The problem, as the poster above you noted, is defendants having access to public defenders, which are underfunded by the state, despite being central to our judicial system’s smooth functioning. People can contest, but if they don’t have a lawyer to help them make arguments or to even know what their rights are under the law, then contesting anything is going to be tough for them, especially when they are going up against well paid and funded prosecutors.
The system is stacked against people without means, essentially.
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Not until we can reach a general consensus that poor people are, ya’ know, actually people.
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So, how about this phrasing instead:
On the basis of a single, jailhouse interview with one of dozens of clients, a public defender must decide which ones have
- Essentially zero chance of successful defense (regardless of Counsel’s belief regarding the client’s innocence), which makes the public defender essentially a broker of plea bargains.
- A nonzero chance of successful defense, which makes the public defender essentially the triage manager of who gets the insanely limited resources for defense and who gets “encouraged” to plead out, even if their defense has some merit.
None of this should be construed as an attack on the courageous, dedicated, selfless public defenders who are the only shred of hope for tens of thousands of defendants who are in the process of being ground to bits by the wheels of “Justice”
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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.”
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Apparently you don’t, in reality, have a right to a public defender so the alternatives seems to be to plead guilty or rot in jail for a trial that is indefinitely postponed. That is the background to my suggestion that you might want to defend yourself. You won’t be able to do it properly, it will be extremely unfair, but still, the alternatives aren’t exactly better. If you are lucky the jury might even feel sympathy.
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Which is why the state is open to a big fat juicy lawsuit. I understand where you are coming from. But it seems there really isn’t an actual alternative. Either rot in jail waiting for trial with limited PD resources or rot in prison being convicted of a crime you might have been able to get off or plead out from.
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What do you think would happen to a lawmaker that has one of two things on their record?
- Voted to raise taxes to pay for lawyers to defend rapists and murderers
- Voted to take away resources from prosecutors to let rapists and murderers go free.
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