Request For Public Defender

To: Judge David Downing, Superior Court of California, Department 1B, 46200 Oasis Street, Indio, CA 92201

From: Inmate Joseph Duncan, Indio Jail #200903677, P.O. Box 1748, Indio, CA 92202

Date: September 27, 2010

Subject: Request For Public Defender

Judge Downing,
I would like to forgo representing myself for the time being and request a public defender for the following reasons:
As I understand my predicament, I have only two choices. I can either accept public defender representation, and allow them to speak and act on my behalf without respect for my wishes, or I can represent myself, and be effectively muted by a flagrant lack of even the most basic resources for preparing a defense.
Since neither of these options provide any reasonable assurance that I will be heard in court, I must return my consideration to the good of the people whom my actions in the past have offended. In this regard, I should note that it has been my intention all along to expose as much of the truth in this matter as possible, in a way that takes into account our current capacity for understanding as a society (not my own understanding).
This means that I must not only review and correlate the huge volume of documentation that already exist in direct relation to this case, but I must also correlate that information with our society's contemporary knowledge and understanding. This is the onerous task that I have given myself in taking on the responsibility of self representation.
This task was already difficult, if not impossible, to begin with, given the severe restriction of resources imposed by the county jail where I am confined, and the lack of any legal assistance, as imposed by other county officials (not to mention the county's deliberate indifference to my long term health issues, i.e. dental problems). But now, with the recently imposed time constraint set by the court, along with more (and serious) restrictions on my investigative resources, I can no longer even imagine a way that it could be possible for me to “prepare for trial”, not even in ten years, much less one. I simply have no reasonable means of collecting, organizing, and correlating the extreme amount of information that is critical to the disposition of this case; in fact, I have barely any means at all.
So, I am forced to conceed that representing myself is futile and no longer a viable means of representing the truth. I am compelled by these circumstances to allow the state's own public defenders to represent what they will on my behalf. I will assist then in good faith and cooperate insofar as their actions represent the interests of the truth.
At this time I formally request to be assigned legal counsel, and I forgo the privelege of self reprentation.

Sincerely, Joseph E. Duncan III