Summary: Counsel in the Criminal Proceedings The objective of my thesis is to describe the position of a defense counsel during a criminal procedure and analyze the currently valid law governing the counsel's position in the criminal proceedings, and how is law applied in real life and also describe duties and obligations of defense counsel. I choose this topic, because during studies of criminal law I was intrigued by the complexity of criminal trial a by the role of the defense counsel in it. I wanted to gain deeper knowledge of rights and obligations of the defense counsel and research limits of criminal defense. Fair trial is considered as one of the fundamental basics of democratic state. The objective of criminal trial is to reach a proper and rightful verdict as a result of fair trial. Criminal trial could be considered fair only if both sides, the defendant and the prosecutor, are both provided with equal rights. Defendant is often a person without thorough legal knowledge and thus is considered to be in disadvantaged position. As opposed to prosecutor, defendant finds himself in new, unknown position, and his basic rights and his future life are endangered. To remedy this situation, defendant can be in criminal proceedings represented by defense counsel, who is professional, has experience and...

Defence by the defence counsel in the trial Abstract The thesis provides the reader with practical overview of the exercise of the rights and obligations of the defense counsel during the trial phase. The aim of the thesis is, in addition to a comprehensive definition of the rights and obligations of the defense counsel in relation to the trial phase of the criminal proceedings, to also set out controversial issues of interpretation of norms of the criminal procedure and deficits of the criminal procedure regulations and outline their possible solutions with regard to the right of defense. The thesis is systematically divided into two parts, the first of which deals with a brief and general description of concepts related to the scope of the thesis. These are, in particular, the right of a fair hearing, the institute of a defense counsel and the stages of the criminal proceedings with an emphasis on the concept of trial phase. The second part is designed taking into account the practical nature of the topic and provides a detailed analysis of the exercise of the rights and obligations of a defense counsel in the trial phase. Emphasis is placed primarily on the exercise of such rights and obligations by which the defense counsel has the opportunity to influcence the decision of the court in favor of the...

Anecdotal evidence supports the belief among indigent individuals who are assigned defense counsel that they would be better represented by privately retained counsel. This perspective jeopardizes attorney effectiveness by reducing communication and trust between the attorney and client. Research on the effectiveness of counsel is sparse. The purpose of this quantitative study was to bridge this gap in knowledge by comparing the effectiveness of privately retained and publicly appointed counsel between 2008 and 2013, both before and after the imposition of state-wide compensation limitations on publicly appointed defense counsel. The theoretical framework was Stuntz's theory, which stresses that one part of the criminal justice system will be compensated for elsewhere in the system. Research questions focused on the success rates of publicly funded and privately retained counsel in jury trials in a large state district court in New England. Data were collected from court records and analyzed using tests of proportions and a binary logistic regression to determine the success rates of the types of counsel and whether appointed counsels' relative effectiveness changed after the compensation limitations were imposed in 2011. The results indicated that there was no significant difference in acquittal rates between counsel groups or for either counsel group before and after the imposition of the statewide compensation limits. Implications for positive social change include educating defendants on the effectiveness of publicly appointed counsel to enhance the trust within these attorney-client relationships, and improving the quality of discourse in legislative deliberations focused on weighing budget cuts to appointed counsel compensation with the risk to the fair administration of justice.