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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

What's horrifying to me is that the real Woods should have been appointed a defense attorney, and it seems that that attorney didn't believe him either or even make an effort to act as though they did. It should have been his defense attorney back during the trial who thought to hunt down the father and do a DNA test.

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If he was homeless it's almost assured that he had a public defender. An LA public defender is so overloaded that[1]:

    L.A. public defenders are carrying workloads that require 4,160 hours of work or more to effectively represent their clients. That is more than double the amount of work hours available in a year, assuming no vacation or sick time is taken.

If I had to work 80 hours per week I'd make a lot of mistakes too. Some attorneys I've talked don't even meet their clients until the day of court. Our public defense system is horribly broken.

1: https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/los-angeles-lags...

He very probably did have a public defender, who seems to have done a very good job by the metric of what most public defenders understand their job to be: negociating with the DA.

Woods managed to not serve any additonal time after sentencing and didn't even have to admit guilt for that.

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