1 Week Down

Just one week and my apprehensions have faded. First of all, while I do still think fighting crime is very important, most "fighting crime" seems to consist of giving young men outrageously long drug possession sentences. At the end of the day, I can easily reconcile defending anyone, even the guilty, with my conscience for two main reasons. First, justice should not depend on class. If rich people can get good attorneys to get them off, then poor people deserve the same. Also, as just alluded to, many defendants are very young and face very long jail sentences. The system is too quick to throw in the towel on people's lives and sometimes, if given the choice between not punishing the guilty and flushing a young, albeit guilty, person's life down the drain, I choose the former. But I guess I'm rationalizing a little. Can you hear it over the world wide web?

I was also apprehensive because I thought the system down here may be too broke for me to do any good. I couldn't feel that way less. This is not too say that the public defender is adequately funded or staffed. Far from. PD's still often have upwards of 50 active cases at once and there is only one xerox machine for a staff of about 50 or 60 (I should double check that number maybe) just to name a few examples off the top of my head. Still, the PD system has been largely revamped and improved after Katrina and its fallout drew attention to its inadequacies. The PD used to have a single room office and we now have a floor. The PD used to have no permanent staff, but rather a series of private attorneys that worked part time for the PD and cycled in and out. Now there is a permanent staff. Kudos to the many former part timers who decided to work for the PD full time.

In this column I feel the same tension, to a much smaller extent obviously, as the PD staff in general. The PD is in the strange position of having to prove its own inadequacy and its own progress. Progress, to show that its possible, inadequacy, to call attention to the fact that more help and resources are desperately needed.

As to my specific job, I have been paired with two lawyers and another intern. For the lawyers, I have looked over case files and brainstormed to think of arguments (generally fact specific, not constitutional) with the lawyers. It's very gratifying. I feel like I'm getting my hands dirty and that the lawyers really appreciate the interns. Sometimes I imagine myself as Jack McCoy (open this link).

Pure Insanity Fact of the Week (hence the insaaaaaane font): Arrested people can be held in pretrial detention for 60 days without being charged with a crime. Until recently, these people would not even have a lawyer for this period of time.