Public Defenders and the Tyranny Prism

[Pertinacious Tom]

How Conservatives Learned to Love Free Lawyers for the Poor

...
Carroll, who has helped restructure public defense systems in 15 states, has heard reactions like Atkinson’s from many liberal reform advocates. But he says looking at the issue through the lens of big government overreach — or what he calls “the tyranny prism” — may provide results that the left ultimately cannot argue with, even though it means sacrificing a central tenet of their ideology.

“A tyrannical government hurts those with the least voice in the political process first, including the poor and people of color,” Carroll says. “Tyranny explains what people on the left want to explain, that the criminal justice system has disproportionate impacts on people of color.” But conservatives are often hesitant to declare the system racist, he said. “The tyranny prism is a framework that allows conservatives to be at the table, too.”

“I’m not trying to excuse racism. I don’t deny racial disparities, those are facts,” Carroll says. “But people don’t believe, ‘I’m racist.’ So why do you have to force them to go to confession just to start working on this? All it does is drive a wedge and make this impossible.”

David Carroll remembers when he first understood the price poor people paid for not being able to afford a good lawyer. In the mid-90s he had just graduated from college and was in Tennessee, working for a group that studied legal systems for the poor. While sitting in a Memphis courtroom, he watched a public defender standing on a chair to offer the same plea deal to a room full of mostly black defendants.

This, he knew, was not what the Supreme Court had intended in 1963 when it ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that defendants facing felony charges had a right to a lawyer even if they couldn’t afford one. Later, the right was extended to anyone facing jail time. But in practice, that promise is broken time and again. Without direction from the court, states have developed a hodgepodge of systems, from state- and county-run public defender offices to contracts with private attorneys and nonprofits.
...

Mr. Carroll is pretty clever. I've said I'm glad we have a public defender on the Supreme Court and my reason is that public defenders get a unique, up-close look at how our justice system really works in practice. They've stood on that chair. Some know it isn't right.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Oops, sorry, forgot the fact check again.

Overall, we rate the Marshall Project as Least Biased based on minimal editorializing. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record.

Sorry as usual for my serial use of sources with a clean fact check record. I know how upsetting that can be.

 

[Voyageur]

wha?

 

[kent_island_sailor]

The Public Defender system is usually very overworked and underfunded.
Are you agreeing that it needs more resources to do a better job?

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

The Public Defender system is usually very overworked and underfunded.
Are you agreeing that it needs more resources to do a better job?

Or maybe just different rules. No matter how much or how little revenue it provides, the whole idea of funding public defenders through traffic tickets seems fucked to me.

 

[kent_island_sailor]

Or maybe just different rules. No matter how much or how little revenue it provides, the whole idea of funding public defenders through traffic tickets seems fucked to me.

Nothing should be funded from law breaking or the whole system collapses if people obey the law
* kind of like the city cop over here that patrols about a 3 block by 2 block area of a little town *that already has a sheriff right down the road* and clearly exists off the earnings of traffic tickets. He also dresses up like he is about to go raid the Isis headquarters while hiding behind a bush waiting for people to roll through a stop sign

 

[sshow bob]

David Carroll is clever and consistent in his drive, and a very useful ally. One of the keys is that he's often 'working' for a legislature that is critical of a failing indigent defense system, so when he comes back with a report he's 'their' guy, and they're willing to hear him.

That's how it went in Maine. His report (really the 6th Amendment Center Report) on Maine provided the Maine indigent defense system the catalyst needed to kick off meaningful change.

(I'm required to add: although I am a State official, I am posting in my individual capacity. This post does not represent the views of the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services.)

 

[basketcase]

Hi tom. Fuck your second amendment

 

[Ease the sheet.]

Nothing should be funded from law breaking or the whole system collapses if people obey the law
* kind of like the city cop over here that patrols about a 3 block by 2 block area of a little town *that already has a sheriff right down the road* and clearly exists off the earnings of traffic tickets. He also dresses up like he is about to go raid the Isis headquarters while hiding behind a bush waiting for people to roll through a stop sign

The best way to fuck something good is to underfund it.

It's the M.O of righties. The icing on the cake is the "we told you it was bad" right after the collapse...

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

This post does not represent the views of the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services.

But it would be nice if it did, and I hope it actually does.

 

[Steam Flyer]

The best way to fuck something good is to underfund it.

It's the M.O of righties. The icing on the cake is the "we told you it was bad" right after the collapse...

Righties all believe fervently, that government can only fuck things up. That's why when they are in charge of -any- piece of government, they deliberately fuck it up... so they can stand back and say "See? See?!?! I was RIGHT all along!"

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Jackson dissents in denial of Louisiana man’s death-row evidence plea

...
David Brown was one of the “Angola 5,” a group that tried unsuccessfully to escape from a maximum-security prison in Louisiana in 1999. During the failed attempt, prison guard David Knapps was beaten to death with a hammer.

Brown admitted that he had tried to escape, but he maintained that he had not been present when Knapps was killed, much less had any role in his death. He was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury in 2011.

Several months after Brown’s trial, prosecutors disclosed for the first time an interview in which another member of the Angola 5, Barry Edge, confessed to Knapps’s murder without implicating Brown. The judge who tried Brown ordered a new sentencing hearing for him in 2014. Judge Jerome Winsberg ruled that the prosecution’s failure to provide Brown with Edge’s statement violated the Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 decision in Brady v. Maryland, holding that prosecutors must provide a defendant with favorable evidence.

But the Louisiana Supreme Court reinstated Brown’s death sentence. It ruled that even if prosecutors had turned over Edge’s statement, it wouldn’t have made a difference in Brown’s case – because, for example, of the physical evidence connecting Brown to the assault on Knapps and because Edge’s statement “is actually silent as to which individuals participated in the physical attack” on Knapps.

Brown came to the Supreme Court last summer, asking the justices to take up his case. On Monday, the justices rejected that plea.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision not to review Brown’s case. In a four-page opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Jackson contended that the Louisiana Supreme Court’s decision reinstating the death penalty was obviously wrong. Edge’s confession was favorable to Brown because, by implicating Edge and another individual in the attack on Knapps, it “supports an inference that Brown was not one of the individuals who killed or decided to kill the victim,” Jackson wrote. And if the jury that sentenced Brown to death had heard Edge’s confession, Jackson continued, there is a chance that at least one juror might have voted to give Brown a life sentence, rather than the death penalty. Therefore, she explained, she would have granted Brown’s petition for review and summarily reversed – that is, ruled in his favor without additional briefing or oral argument.
...

Louisiana's brief has the physical evidence. Lots of unexplainable blood and boots and stuff.

I'm pretty sure Brown was at the very least involved in Knapp's death.

Some pretty unpleasant people shape the contours of our rights. The question isn't whether Brown is a murderous shit. It's whether prosecutors have to share a confession.