Southern Florida Public Defender Robert R. Jacobs died last night of a heart attack at the age of 62. While it’s always sad when someone dies, this story caught my attention for the way the press appears to be eulogizing this public defender. Rather than talk about the successes Mr. Jacobs had during his career defending the indigent, Jason Wermers of the southwest Florida News-Press decided to list a string of high-profile cases that resulted in convictions and even death sentences for Mr. Jacobs’ clients. That’s just so not right.

I don’t know anything about Mr. Jacobs other than what I can find online, but from the seriousness of the cases mentioned in the news coverage of his death and fromhis biography on the PD website, it’s clear he had an incredible and inspirational career. First, he was a public defender since 1973 ââ�¬â�� that’s nearly 25 years of taking this kind of bullshit from the public and the press and yet he continued to fight for his client’s rights and to defend the constitution to his very end. There is no doubt he won countless battles in the decades he served as a public defender, whether those battles were high-stakes trials or sentencing arguments or probation violation hearings or bond arguments or suppression arguments ââ�¬â�� whatever they were, he had to have won and won and won in that amount of time, yet the newspaper can’t find room to mention any of that?

In addition to Mr. Jacob’s incredible career as a public defender, his bio shows that he spent his free time outside of work giving back to his community in nearly every way you could imagine. He coached youth soccer and managed Babe Ruth baseball, he was active in his church and even served on the board of directors of his local symphony. As the newspaper notes, Mr. Jacobs was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, as well. In short, it sounds like he served his country and his local communities selflessly for his entire life, yet, upon his death, the best the newspaper can do is “he lost some really big cases.”

Mr. Wermers, if you’re reading this (as the result of a vanity Google, no doubt) you and your editors should really be ashamed of yourselves. No wonder the Public Defender blogging awards are called “the Rodneys.” No respect, indeed!

UPDATE: It appears I may have been a bit harsh w/Mr. Wermers and the southern Florida News-Press. Yesterday they posted a longer article about Mr. Jacobs that gives a more balanced and well-rounded picture of his life. I’m sure the first story was just the best they could do to get the story out quickly and it took time to get comments and background from friends and associates. I apologize for jumping the gun with my criticism.

For still more about Robert Jacobs’ life and career, see also the coverage in the Sun Herald.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 5:02 am and is filed under Crimlaw. It has had 210 views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response here, send a trackback from your own site, or rate this post right here:

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