I think it’s based on the following quotes from the linked article:
So when Carter got locked up, he waited until he could meet with a court-appointed lawyer who could help mount his defense. Finally, after three months, Carter met his counsel during his arraignment.
Carter said he has barely seen him since.
“He hasn’t come to visit me once,” Carter claims, adding the attorney hasn’t conducted interviews or done anything to investigate the circumstances surrounding his charge. In a December court date, the district attorney and the defender jointly requested and received a continuance, yet again pushing back a decision on Carter’s fate. The lawyer didn’t speak to Carter again. (The East Baton Rouge public defender office didn’t reply to a request for comment.)
“The public defender,” he sighs, “they don’t do anything for you.”
[…]
While preparing for the lawsuit, SPLC lawyers spent months observing courtrooms and meeting defendants across the state. What they say they found is shocking. Many defendants were encouraged to plead guilty without any investigation into the strength of the state’s case. Lawyers regularly didn’t know or recognize their clients. In one case, a public defender only spoke to an inmate through a microphone, asking him, from across a courtroom, if he wanted to plead guilty. Occasionally defendants would walk up to the podium and plead guilty without any noticeable representation at all.
It’s true that the problem is with the system, and the fact that each public defender has up to five times as much work as they should have, which is going to have a negative impact on the quality of the representation that any one client is going to get. And Cory certainly should not be telling us what is going on in the heads of public defenders, who are their best trying to help these people. But I can see how someone can read the paragraphs above and come to the conclusion that these particular cases, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, are being “indifferently argued.”
