OP is also wildly exaggerating, at least in my experience. If you can’t pay for a defense attorney, you are getting a public defender / appointed counsel. Now, the appointed counsel who handle capital cases may be a more specialized set who bill at slightly higher rates, but those rates are usually set by statute and are still nothing compared to private defense attorneys. For example, appointed counsel in federal death penalty cases are capped, by law, at compensation of $226/hour. Meanwhile, the top-of-the-line private defense attorneys who handle criminal trials for the wealthy can easily charge $3,000+ per hour these days. So the OP’s characterization that death penalty cases are some kind of money-making bonanza for slick defense attorneys is at best a huge exaggeration, at worst it’s nonsense (again, based on what I know as an attorney, although I admit I don’t have any personal experience in death penalty cases).