 |
Report Comment
"Is our public defender system as broken as Michigan’s?
This morning, NPR Morning Edition ran a piece discussing the abject failure of the Michigan public defender system in representing the poor.
See http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154849477/michigan-finally-eyeing-changes-to-lawyers-for-poor
In Michigan, public defenders are often the lowest bidders, paid by the case, not the workload. So they have reason to urge their poor clients to plead guilty as fast as possible, doing as little work as possible, so they can run as many through the system as fast as possible, and thus make a decent living. Individual case loads can run as high as 400 per year, leaving no time to investigate or prepare a case.
As a result, an innocent person like Mr. Edward Carter can spend as much as 35 years in jail for a crime of violence committed while he was in custody on other charges. An ACLU lawyer suing the State calls it “assembly line justice”, just another way of saying “railroad”. Even the Republican Governor and a County Prosecutor acknowledge that the system is broken.
Can you see DA Tim Harris acknowledging the same thing about the railroad running through the Tulsa County Mental Health Court? I think that a certain warm place would freeze over and warm back up again first. It’s much too handy for disposing of people he can’t successfully prosecute in a criminal court.
So how do public defenders get paid here? Obviously not enough to inform their captive clients of all their rights. Or to mount a zealous defense, or to demand a rigorous and even-handed investigation by police,. Or to object to hearsay, to patently false statements filed by the Court, to bogus evidentiary standards, to the lack of cross examination of accusers, and to the corrupt practice of allowing the jailers and their effective subcontractors to be the only “witnesses”.
No, in order to support such things, they would first have to have a sense of shame about their failure to uphold the Constitution. In this neck of the woods, you can’t even depend on getting that from a Federal Judge or District Attorney. "
|
|
