DA vs. PD Funding: The Bay Area’s Defense Parity Gap

Everyone in criminal defense knows the prosecution has more resources. But how much more? And does it vary by county? This article answers both questions with hard numbers. We analyzed budget documents, staffing reports, and expenditure data from all nine Bay Area counties to quantify the gap between District Attorney offices and Public Defender offices — dollar by dollar, attorney by attorney, caseload by caseload. The results confirm what defenders experience every day: the system is structurally tilted against the defense. But the degree of that tilt varies dramatically depending on where you practice.

Understanding Funding Parity: What the Numbers Mean

Before diving into the county-by-county data, it helps to understand the metric we are using. The defense-to-DA spending ratio is a simple calculation: take the total annual budget of the Public Defender’s office and divide it by the total annual budget of the District Attorney’s office. A ratio of 1.0 means dollar-for-dollar parity — for every dollar the prosecution spends, the defense spends one dollar. A ratio of 0.50 means the defense operates on half the prosecution’s budget.

The American Bar Association has long recommended that indigent defense systems be funded at parity with prosecution offices. The logic is constitutional: the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to effective assistance of counsel, and counsel cannot be effective if it is systematically under-resourced relative to the adversary. A public defender who carries twice the caseload of the prosecutor on the other side of the courtroom, who has no investigator when the prosecution has three, who cannot afford expert witnesses when the prosecution retains them routinely — that public defender cannot provide the quality of representation the Constitution demands, no matter how talented or dedicated they are.

In practice, parity is the exception, not the norm. Nationally, the average defense-to-DA spending ratio hovers around 0.52 — meaning public defender offices operate on roughly half the resources of the prosecution. California performs slightly better at approximately 0.56, partly because the state’s public defender offices benefit from stronger union protections and more robust civil service salary structures. The Bay Area average sits at approximately 0.59, somewhat above the state average, pulled upward by San Francisco’s comparatively generous funding model.

But averages conceal enormous variation. The difference between San Francisco’s 0.83 ratio and Solano’s 0.53 ratio represents two fundamentally different visions of what the defense function should look like. In San Francisco, the Public Defender’s office can afford dedicated social workers, mitigation specialists, immigration attorneys, and multiple investigators per unit. In Solano, the PD office is stretched so thin that attorneys routinely handle 150+ felony cases simultaneously with minimal support staff. Same state, same constitution, dramatically different realities.

County-by-County Funding Breakdown: All 9 Bay Area Counties

The following data is compiled from FY 2024–2025 county budget documents, California State Controller reports, and public records requests filed by our research team. All figures represent total departmental budgets including salaries, benefits, operating expenses, and allocated overhead. Note that DA budgets typically include some functions that do not have defense equivalents (e.g., consumer protection, environmental crimes, civil asset forfeiture units), which makes direct comparison somewhat imperfect — but even accounting for these functions, the gap remains substantial.

Several patterns stand out. First, the absolute size of the gap correlates with county size — Santa Clara’s $57M gap is the largest in raw dollars because it has the biggest DA budget in the region at $128M. But the ratio tells the more meaningful story. Santa Clara’s 0.55 ratio means the Public Defender’s office operates on just 55 cents for every dollar the prosecution spends. For a county that processes some of the most complex cases in the Bay Area — including major technology-related fraud, gang cases, and capital-eligible homicides — this level of under-resourcing has direct consequences for defense quality.

Second, San Francisco is clearly the outlier. At 0.83, it is the only Bay Area county where the Public Defender’s office receives more than two-thirds of what the DA receives. This is not accidental. San Francisco has a long history of investing in public defense, driven by a politically progressive Board of Supervisors, a nationally recognized Public Defender’s office (under both Jeff Adachi and the current leadership), and a local legal culture that treats defense funding as a civil rights priority rather than a budgetary afterthought. The result is an office that can operate a robust holistic defense model — with social workers, immigration specialists, reentry coordinators, and a dedicated training unit — that most other Bay Area PD offices simply cannot afford.

Third, the eastern and northern Bay Area counties — Solano (0.53), Contra Costa (0.56), and Napa (0.57) — cluster at the bottom. These counties share certain characteristics: more conservative political environments, less organized defense bar advocacy, and county budget processes that historically treat the PD office as a cost center rather than a constitutional obligation. In Solano, the 0.53 ratio means defenders operate on barely more than half the prosecution’s resources — a disparity that manifests in crushing caseloads, minimal investigation support, and chronic difficulty recruiting and retaining experienced attorneys.

San Francisco: The Bay Area’s Best-Funded Defense (Ratio: 0.83)

San Francisco’s $68M Public Defender budget funds approximately 120 attorneys, 25 investigators, 15 social workers, 8 immigration specialists, and a full administrative and training staff. The office handles roughly 22,000 cases annually. The resulting caseload-per-attorney ratio — approximately 183 cases per attorney — is the lowest in the Bay Area and approaches (though does not meet) national caseload standards. The DA’s office, at $82M, employs approximately 155 attorneys. The $14M gap is real, but it is the narrowest in the region and allows the PD office to deliver a genuinely holistic defense model. San Francisco’s PD office is one of the few in California that can match the prosecution witness-for-witness, expert-for-expert on most cases.

Alameda: Strong Office, Persistent Gap (Ratio: 0.64)

Alameda County’s Public Defender office — one of the largest in the Bay Area — operates on $72M against the DA’s $113M. The $41M gap funds approximately 135 PD attorneys compared to approximately 215 DA attorneys. Alameda’s PD office has historically punched above its weight: it maintains a strong felony trial unit, an active appellate division, and one of the Bay Area’s best mental health defense programs. But the 0.64 ratio means the office cannot match the DA’s investigative capacity. The DA’s Bureau of Investigation employs over 50 sworn investigators with law enforcement powers. The PD’s investigation unit has fewer than 20 investigators, all civilian. For complex cases involving forensic evidence, digital surveillance, or multi-defendant conspiracies, this investigative gap can be decisive.

Santa Clara: Big Budget, Bigger Gap (Ratio: 0.55)

Santa Clara is the Bay Area’s most populous county and processes the highest volume of felony cases. The DA’s $128M budget — the largest in the region — funds approximately 240 attorneys, a sophisticated crime lab, a major crimes unit with dedicated prosecutors, and extensive victim services. The PD’s $71M budget funds approximately 140 attorneys and a smaller support infrastructure. The 0.55 ratio is one of the lowest in the Bay Area, and it shows in the numbers: Santa Clara PD attorneys carry average felony caseloads exceeding 200 cases per attorney, well above recommended standards. The office has struggled with retention, losing experienced felony attorneys to the DA’s office (which pays more for comparable positions), to private practice, and to better-resourced PD offices in San Francisco and Alameda.

Contra Costa: Aggressive Prosecution, Underfunded Defense (Ratio: 0.56)

Contra Costa’s $68M DA budget supports approximately 130 attorneys and one of the most aggressive filing practices in the Bay Area. The DA’s office has been historically reluctant to decline cases, resulting in a high volume of prosecutions that flow downstream to the PD office. That PD office operates on $38M — funding approximately 75 attorneys to handle an caseload that the DA’s filing volume generates. The math is punishing: Contra Costa PD attorneys carry some of the highest caseloads in the region, averaging over 220 open cases per attorney. The 0.56 ratio, combined with the DA’s aggressive filing posture, creates a situation where defenders are not just under-resourced relative to the prosecution — they are overwhelmed by sheer volume. This is the county where the funding gap arguably causes the most direct harm to defense quality.

Solano: The Bay Area’s Deepest Parity Gap (Ratio: 0.53)

Solano County’s 0.53 ratio is the lowest in the Bay Area. The DA’s $32M budget funds approximately 65 attorneys; the PD’s $17M funds approximately 32 attorneys. In a county that processes a significant felony caseload — driven in part by its proximity to major interstate corridors and military installations — 32 PD attorneys is not enough. Average caseloads exceed 250 cases per attorney, nearly double the national standard of 150 felonies per attorney per year recommended by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. The office has experienced chronic turnover: experienced attorneys leave for better-resourced offices, and the office fills positions with new attorneys who face a steep learning curve under enormous caseload pressure. This creates a vicious cycle where the most challenging defendants — those in the most under-resourced county — are represented by the least experienced attorneys.

San Mateo, Sonoma, Marin, and Napa: The Mid-Range Counties

The remaining four counties cluster between 0.57 and 0.61. San Mateo (0.58, DA $48M vs. PD $28M) is a wealthy county whose defense funding does not reflect its fiscal capacity. The $20M gap is notable because San Mateo’s overall county budget is one of the healthiest in California — the county could afford to invest more in public defense and simply has not. Sonoma (0.58, DA $38M vs. PD $22M) faces similar dynamics: a moderate-sized county with a traditional approach to criminal justice funding that has not kept pace with rising caseloads and increasing case complexity, particularly in DUI, domestic violence, and property crime categories.

Marin County (0.61, DA $18M vs. PD $11M) performs better than most mid-range counties, partly because its low case volume allows the PD’s smaller budget to stretch further on a per-case basis. With fewer than 3,000 total cases annually, Marin PD attorneys carry manageable caseloads despite the funding gap. Napa (0.57, DA $14M vs. PD $8M) is the smallest Bay Area county by both population and criminal case volume, but its 0.57 ratio means the PD office operates with significant constraints — particularly when complex cases (homicides, sexual assaults, major frauds) require expert witnesses and extended investigation that the PD’s budget cannot easily absorb.

Attorney Staffing Parity: The People Behind the Budgets

Budget numbers tell part of the story. Attorney headcount tells another. The number of attorneys each office employs — and the resulting caseload per attorney — is where the funding gap translates into the daily lived experience of public defenders and their clients. An attorney who carries 150 cases can prepare for hearings, visit clients, review discovery, and consult with experts. An attorney who carries 250 cases is triaging: deciding which clients get their attention today and which ones wait. That is not effective assistance of counsel. That is crisis management.

The caseload disparity is stark. Across the Bay Area, PD attorneys carry an average of 212 cases per year compared to 130 for DA attorneys — a 63% higher caseload. But the numbers are even more revealing when you consider what each side does with their caseload. DA attorneys benefit from law enforcement investigation before they ever see a case: police reports, witness statements, forensic evidence, body camera footage, and often a fully developed theory of the case are handed to prosecutors at filing. PD attorneys start from zero. They must independently investigate the facts, interview witnesses, review discovery (often voluminous and provided in formats that require hours of processing), identify legal issues, research applicable law, and develop a defense theory — all while managing a caseload that is 63% larger than the prosecutor’s.

The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommends a maximum of 150 felonies per attorney per year. The ABA’s more recent standards suggest even lower limits. Only two Bay Area counties — Marin (140) and Napa (160) — come close to meeting these standards, and they achieve this primarily through low case volume rather than adequate staffing. In the larger counties where the stakes are highest, caseloads of 200+ are the norm. In Solano, 250 cases per attorney is not a temporary crisis — it is the structural baseline.

What the Gap Means for Defense Outcomes

The funding gap is not an abstract budgetary concern. It translates directly into measurable differences in defense quality and client outcomes. Three areas bear the most immediate impact: investigation capacity, expert witness access, and attorney preparation time.

Investigation Resources

Across the Bay Area, DA offices employ approximately 380 investigators region-wide. Many of these investigators are sworn peace officers with law enforcement training, access to criminal databases, and the authority to compel cooperation. Public Defender offices employ approximately 120 investigators total — a 3.2:1 ratio that does not even account for the fact that prosecutors also benefit from the investigative work of police departments, sheriff’s offices, and state and federal agencies. The effective investigation ratio is closer to 10:1 or higher. In practice, this means that many defense cases receive no independent investigation at all. A PD attorney carrying 220 cases and sharing an investigator with four other attorneys must make triage decisions about which cases warrant investigation. Cases with strong factual defenses may never be investigated because the attorney does not have time to identify the investigative leads, and the investigator does not have bandwidth to pursue them.

Expert Witness Access

DA offices have standing relationships with crime labs, forensic accountants, DNA experts, digital forensics analysts, and other technical experts. Many of these experts are on staff or retained under blanket contracts funded by the DA’s budget. PD offices must request expert witness funding on a case-by-case basis, often through the court under Evidence Code Section 730 or Penal Code Section 987.9. This process is slow, uncertain, and subject to judicial discretion. A 2024 study by the California Public Defenders Association found that 987.9 requests are denied or underfunded approximately 35% of the time in Bay Area courts. When defense expert funding is denied, the prosecution’s technical evidence goes unchallenged — not because the science is sound, but because the defense cannot afford to test it.

Attorney Preparation Time

This is the most fundamental impact and the hardest to measure. When a PD attorney carries 220 cases versus a DA attorney’s 130, the defense attorney has approximately 40% less time per case. For a felony case that receives an average of 20 hours of attorney time over its lifecycle, that 40% reduction means approximately 8 fewer hours — 8 fewer hours to review discovery, research legal issues, prepare motions, interview witnesses, meet with the client, and prepare for hearings or trial. Those 8 hours are the difference between a motion to suppress that gets filed and one that does not. Between a plea negotiation backed by independent investigation and one that takes the prosecution’s case at face value. Between a client who feels heard and represented and one who feels processed.

The downstream effects are visible in our platform data. Counties with higher PD caseloads show lower rates of defense motion filing (suppression motions, Pitchess motions, expert funding requests), lower trial rates, and higher early plea rates. This is not because defenders in those counties are less skilled or less dedicated. It is because they do not have enough time. The funding gap converts directly into a preparation gap, which converts into an outcome gap. Our prosecution watch dashboard tracks these metrics in real time, allowing defenders and advocates to quantify the impact of funding disparities on actual case outcomes.

What’s Being Done: Legislation, Advocacy, and the Path to Parity

The good news is that the defense parity gap has become a recognized policy issue at both the state and national level. Multiple efforts are underway to close the gap, though progress is slow and faces significant political headwinds. Here is where things stand.

State Legislation

The Gideon’s Promise Movement

At the national level, the movement to fulfill the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright — the 1963 Supreme Court decision establishing the right to appointed counsel — has gained significant momentum. Organizations like Gideon’s Promise, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), and the Brennan Center for Justice have produced extensive research documenting the scope of the indigent defense crisis. Their advocacy has helped shift the conversation from “should we fund public defense?” to “how much must we fund public defense to satisfy constitutional requirements?”

Several states have moved ahead of California. New York established the Office of Indigent Legal Services in 2010 with authority to set and enforce standards for public defense representation statewide. Michigan created the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission in 2013. Idaho, after being sued for systemic Sixth Amendment violations, established a state-funded public defense system in 2022. These models demonstrate that meaningful reform is possible, but they also show that it typically requires either litigation or a political crisis to catalyze action.

County-Level Advocacy

While state and national reform efforts are important, the most immediate opportunities for closing the parity gap exist at the county level, where budgets are adopted annually by boards of supervisors. In the Bay Area, organized advocacy campaigns have produced measurable results in several counties.

In Alameda County, the Public Defender’s office worked with the Alameda County Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Committee to present data on caseload impacts to the Board of Supervisors during the FY 2025–2026 budget cycle. The presentation — which included data from our platform’s prosecution watch dashboard — resulted in a $4.2M supplemental allocation that funded 12 new PD attorney positions and 4 investigator positions. This moved Alameda’s ratio from 0.60 to 0.64 in a single budget year.

In Santa Clara, the public defender has adopted a different strategy: filing caseload-based motions under Penal Code Section 987.05, which allows the court to declare a PD unavailable when caseloads exceed constitutionally adequate levels. While these motions are rarely granted (judges are reluctant to declare the PD unavailable because it triggers expensive conflict counsel appointments), they serve a critical documentation function. Each motion creates a record of the caseload crisis that can be cited in budget hearings, media coverage, and legislative advocacy. The strategy is working: Santa Clara’s Board of Supervisors approved a $3.8M increase for the PD in the current fiscal year, the largest single-year increase in the office’s history.

For defenders in counties where the parity gap is widest — Solano, Contra Costa, Napa — the path forward requires sustained, data-driven advocacy. This means documenting caseload numbers, tracking motion filing rates, measuring outcome disparities, and presenting this data to county budget decision-makers in a format they can act on. The data infrastructure exists through platforms like ours. The question is whether the defense community organizes to use it.

What Full Parity Would Look Like

It is worth imagining what the Bay Area’s defense landscape would look like if parity were achieved. Full parity does not mean identical budgets — it means that the defense has the resources to match the prosecution’s capacity on every case. In practical terms, this would mean:

This is not a utopian fantasy. San Francisco’s PD office operates close to this model today, and it shows in the results. San Francisco has the lowest felony conviction rate in the Bay Area (62%), the highest trial rate (6.2%), the lowest state prison rate for convicted felons (18%), and the most robust diversion system. A well-funded defense bar does not just protect individual defendants — it disciplines the entire system. Prosecutors file better cases. Judges make better decisions. Outcomes more closely reflect the merits of each case rather than the resource disparity between the parties. Every county in the Bay Area could achieve these results. The obstacle is not legal or logistical. It is financial and political.

How Defenders Can Use This Data

Funding parity data has applications beyond policy advocacy. Here are concrete ways practicing defenders can leverage these numbers in their daily work.

The Numbers Are the Argument

Sixty years after Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to counsel remains conditional on where you are arrested. A defendant in San Francisco receives defense representation that approaches — though still does not reach — parity with the prosecution. A defendant forty-five minutes away in Solano receives representation funded at barely half the prosecution’s level. Both defendants have the same constitutional right. Only one receives anything close to its fulfillment.

The $206M funding gap across the Bay Area’s nine counties is not an abstraction. It is 396 attorneys who do not exist. It is 240 investigators who are not interviewing witnesses. It is thousands of expert reports that are never commissioned, thousands of motions that are never filed, and thousands of clients whose cases are resolved on the prosecution’s terms because their lawyer did not have the time or resources to develop an alternative. Every dollar of that gap translates into human consequences — longer sentences, more guilty pleas, less justice.

The data is available. The policy solutions exist. What is needed is the political will to match our constitutional commitments with the resources they require. For defenders working within the current system, the most important thing you can do today is document the impact of the gap — in your cases, in your motions, in your testimony before budget committees, and in the public record. The numbers are the argument. Make sure they are heard.