While adding the Rodney-Winners to the blogroll yesterday I noticed Doubtslinger’s latest post about his 17-year-old client who pled no-contest to assault with a deadly weapon on Thursday. He writes:

If my client were an adult, I’d be thrilled with the outcome. But the grim reality is that a kid is going to prison where he will learn to be the gang member he is aspiring to be. He’ll be out in about two and a half years a leaner, meaner son of a bitch.

He could have been saved. His participation in this event was at best a bystander, at worst a bystander with bad intentions. I don’t know what led the prosecutor to direct-file on this kid. They could have asked the juvenile court for a fitness hearing, where a social history could have been done, we could have hired child-psychiatrists and social workers to take a long, hard look at this kid and decide whether this is someone society should throw away.

The voters of this great state gave the prosecution the power to skip the psychobabble and treat kids like the grown ups they aren’t. Once a case is direct filed, there is nothing a defense attorney can do until the conclusion of the trial, and hope that the judge will sentence his client as a juvenile instead of as an adult. At least when that issue is dealt with on the front end, a defense attorney knows whether or not he’s playing high stakes poker, and can better advise his client.

First, there are so many great points in there. Our justice system leaves so much discretion to prosecutors that if they fail to exercise it, we end up with a broken system where no justice is done. Here, it appears the prosecutor used his/her discretion to bully this kid into pleading guilty to a very serious charge. The bullying was two-foldââ�¬â��first by directly filing to treat the kid as an adult, and second with the attempted murder charge the prosecutor most likely knew he/she would never win. If you ask me, that’s an abuse of the system, but, then, you didn’t ask me, did you?

Second, what a great post! I wish I could write posts like this on a regular basis. I’ve seen similar injustices countless times in the past year and I always think about writing about them, but I’m honestly afraid to do so while the incidents are still fresh in my mind. The jurisdiction I’m in is so small that there’s always the chance someone would see the post and it would somehow affect my client prior to sentencing. Even after a case is closed I worry about writing about it for the same reason. I’m not sure if being in a larger jurisdiction would change that, or if I’d have to go to a super-secret anonyblog to feel free enough to write that way. Er, perhaps I already have a super-secret anonyblog. Would you know if I did? ;-)

Technorati Tags: prosecutorial discretion

Congratulations to all of this year’s Rodney Award Winnersââ�¬â��the very best of the public defender blogging world. All winners are now linked in the blogroll on the lower right so I (and you, if you want) can get to know them better in the coming months.

While I think all the winners have great blogs, I really think Woman In Black should have won her categories and even been a contender for Best Blog overall. Every post she writes is just fascinating to me � great insights into the law, the practice of law, and important bits of life, as well.

But it was a very high-quality field. If you’re a reader looking for quality writing about the work and lives of public defenders, you’ll find plenty among this group. Again, congratulations to all!

If you’re a public defender you probably end up getting some number of phone calls from your clients in jail. For me, that’s about 50-75% of the calls I get each day. All those calls come from payphones, and nearly every single call brings me some new task to complete, conundrum to solve, problem to get angry about, or challenge to surmount. So again I ask: What did the payphone bring you today?

Today for me brought a string of calls from clients who were well-behaved and quiet over the holidays, but are now getting restless to hear updates on their cases. Very busy day.

I’ve also spent a bit of time yesterday and today working on cleaning off the desk, tying up as many loose ends from 2007 as possible. I can see places on my desk that I haven’t seen in months! Next: The piles on the floor! Isn’t there a feng shui lesson in there? Piles keep you mired in the past? It’s time to move forward, so the days for those piles are few.

Finally, I’ve been working on improving my systems for attack and defense. By that I mean, I’m trying to figure out a way to keep focused far enough in the future in terms of court dates and other deadlines that I can aggressively represent my clients ââ�¬â�� that’s the attack. At the same time I’m trying to devise a low-overhead system for documenting what I do so I can remember it all and so I can cover my ass if any of those pesky IAC/ODC claims come up. It’s sort of the Kick Your Ass While I Cover Mine system. Our case management system is Justware Defender and it is so hopelessly slow and inadequate that it is of no help whatsoever in these areas. Instead (and I really hate to say this), I’m learning to use Outlook and Word to keep myself on task and keep good records of what I’m doing. So far, the experiment is in its infancy, but I’ve had two pretty productive days in a row w/it, so hope springs eternal.

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.

The infamous Tennessee Pot Cave is for sale. It seems the creative mind behind the cave has been in a bit of trouble. Maybe he should have bought Barry Cooper’s Never Get Busted Again video and he’d still be happy in his cave.

In fact, perhaps public defender offices everywhere should join together and purchase bulk quantities of Cooper’s video to distribute throughout our communities as a public service. Such an effort would be a great compliment to the “Stopped for DUI? Don’t blow!” ad campaign to ensure citizens understand their rights when it comes to that substance, as well.

See also: More on Barry Cooper from NPR. [tags]drugs, 4th amendment[/tags]

I dreamed last night that a judge recessed court at the end of a day and then stood up and bragged about how few cases went to trial in his court. In my dream I stood up and told him that was nothing to brag about because it showed he was setting bonds far too high and coercing guilty pleas. In my dream we got into a shouting match about it and he’s the one that stormed from the room.

I can dream.

Not long ago something a little like this actually happened. My client and I won a motion to withdraw his guilty plea on a misdemeanor only to have the judge explicitly say “I’m going to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea but I’m going to set a high bond.” Needless to say, the bond was so high my client would have ended up spending at least two months in jail waiting for his trialââ�¬â��and this after he’d already served the sentence on his previous guilty plea and served only a few days jail time on the prior sentence. I explained this to the judge and requested a more reasonable bond that would account for these facts. The answer was absolutely not, but the judge would accept my client’s guilty plea if he didn’t want to go to jail. So, of course, what did my client do? He pled guilty again and walked out disgusted with the criminal justice system. So did I. [tags]bond, guilty pleas[/tags]

Blonde Justice (who, sadly, is leaving our PD ranks soon) has been hosting a great conversation about how many people who plead guilty really are and whether courts allow no-contest and Alford pleas. Some great stuff in there, not least this from an anonymous commenter who says he/she practices in St. Louis:

in my jurisdiction judges no not really enhance punishment if a defendant exercises his right to a jury trial.

Wouldn’t that be nice!? We’d have a helluva lot more trials if that were the case in my jurisdiction. It’s very discouraging how much of our criminal justice system ends up resting on mythical principles that turn out in practice to be basically empty platitudes , e.g., “right to trial by jury” and “presumption of innocence.” Here, if you “waste” a court’s time by exercising your right to trial when “everybody” knows you’re guilty, well, you better be ready to get double or triple or more punishment than you could have expected prior to the trial. Justice? Constitutional rights? What are those things?

In this jurisdiction judges commonly take nolo/no-contest pleas; it’s the prosecutors you have to convince. The prosecutors seem to decide on a case-by-case basis whether they’ll take such a plea, and it’s not clear to me what makes the difference. Sometimes I suspect it comes down to whether they think such a plea will make the difference between getting a conviction by plea and having to go to trial, but I really haven’t figured it out.

I really like my job. In fact, I love it. Where I do my job? Well…. It leaves much to be desired. So of course I’m interested in what the experience of being a public defender is like for people in other places, and especially what it’s like to be a newly graduated PD in other places. So I was fascinated to learn that about these three new hires in Victorville, CA. Apparently they start out with “an extensive four-week training course” and then they go to trial. That sounds pretty cool. The fact that the local paper profiles them prior to their first trials so that their clients are likely to know that their attorney is fresh off the pumpkin truck?¹ That’s not so cool, yet it is cool because it shows a community interest in public defenders that certainly seems absent here.

One of these new public defenders said that one reason she wanted to be a public defender is the quality of people she works with:

�I think that public defenders in general are great people to work with,� Dyerly said. �They have huge hearts.�

Sounds like a bright-eyed, idealistic, newly-graduated law student, doesn’t it?

How about it, folks? I know just about every public defender out there w/a blog is the kind of person Ms. Dyerly describes, but is the same true of the people you work with? Are public defenders big-hearted in general, or are they just as petty, selfish, and egomaniacal as any other attorney? Inquiring minds want to know…

1. This would be assuming that public defender clients read newspapers. Your instinct might be that the average person who can’t afford a lawyer probably also does not read the newspaper. That may be true so long as that average client is not in jail. If your clients are in jail, be prepared: They probably know more about local news (especially as it relates to criminal justice) than you do. ↩

Gee, it’s too bad I’m so busy. If I had some free time I could head up the road to the Testical Festival. When in Rome…

I was actually very near there on Thursday when I attended Sentence Review at the Montana State Prison. I was reminded that prisons are our society’s blatant expression of hopelessness. We send people to prison to throw them away, to give up on them, and by doing so we are saying that we have no hope for these people. You’ll hear proponents of incarceration talk about how prisoners have access to all kinds of rehabilitative programs to help them come out better than they went in, but you won’t hear much about stuff like that from the people who actually work in prisons or from the prisoners themselves. Those are the people that know how unlikely it is that prison is going to be good for anyoneââ�¬â��prisoner or the society who sent him there.

On the bright side, the sadness of prisons makes the work of public defenders all the more important . . . even if people do use their freedom to do nothing more than eat cow’s balls. . . .

Last week I mused about whether my daily uniform of suit and tie was a sign that I’ve sold out. The jury remains out on that question, but now the European Union has raised the question of whether such attire might be contributing to global warming.

I kid you not: A “senior commissioner” (what does that mean) at the EU has proposed that men stop wearing ties in the summer so that the EU can turn down the air conditioning in its offices. The article doesn’t say exactly, but I assume they would also stop wearing the jackets, which are frankly ridiculous in weather over about 75 degrees.

I don’t know about you, but I’m all for it! I understand the desire to make sure lawyers look professional in order to show respect and make a good impression on both court and client. However, why can’t a “professional” look be accomplished by some combination of clothes that is more comfortable and less ridiculous? Jackets in the fall and winter? Fine. Ties? Never. As much as some in the U.S. legal world oppose following the Europeans for any reason, I say we jump aboard this train and ride it all the way to shorts, sandals, and Hawaiian shirts in court. Tasteful and muted colors only, please.