The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to effective assistance of counsel. In practice, public defenders carry caseloads exceeding 500 felony cases per year — a number that makes meaningful representation mathematically impossible.
The system does not fail by accident. It fails by design through the systematic underfunding of institutions that exist to check its power. When a public defender has seven minutes to review a client's case before trial, the right to counsel becomes a constitutional guarantee legal fiction.
WARNING: The following analysis contains findings that contradict the official record.