So let’s say for the sake of argument that you are a crackhead. Just bear with me for a moment.
Being a crackhead, you get more than a little sloppy, and eventually you’re picked up for possession of the aforementioned crack. You’re thrown in County, and assigned a public defender … because, being a crackhead, it’s not like you saved money for legal fees.
The public defender, meanwhile, is a perfectly typical public defender: he’s fresh out of law school, idealistic. He’s paid next to nothing, works long hours and will likely be assigned over 500 cases in the course of a year. Yours is the fifth file he’s been handed today.
Here’s the question: On a scale of one to 10, how fucked are you?
If you answered, “I’m so fucked it’s not funny,” congratulations! You can’t count properly, but that’s a mildly correct answer.
For the purpose of this column, that situation was hypothetical. But it’s a pretty accurate description of the state of our legal system, where public defenders have a higher turnover rate than a pastry shop. (If you laughed at that joke, high five.)
Here’s the situation, in case you haven’t caught on at this point: public defenders hold positions that are mandated by the Constitution, but are paid low wages for high workloads. Often these public servants are given no time to familiarize themselves with the evidence or meet with the defendant before entering into plea bargaining talks.
The result? Miscarriages of justice on a grand scale. According to The New York Times, former public defender Arthur Jones defended a man accused of grand theft, which held a minimum sentence of one year in jail; the prosecution mistakenly calculated the minimum sentence as 2.6 years. The accused could “easily have gotten three years instead of one” for stealing locks from a hardware store, Mr. Jones said.
Another public defender, Amy Weber, had 13 cases set for trial on a single day in April, forcing her to delay most of the proceedings and ruining one of her client’s chances for a one-year plea bargain. The man in question received a five-year sentence instead.
Apparently, the “right to a speedy and public trial” means that shuffling these poor bastards through the court system at supersonic velocities is more important than basic justice. “Haste makes waste,” as the saying goes, and when the “waste” in question is human life and freedom, haste is simply unacceptable.
What’s the solution? Pay public defenders higher wages, and hire more of them. I realize the economy makes a measure like this tough, but I’m not asking for unilateral change overnight.
I’m asking for a system that will allow defendants to actually work on their case with their lawyer before appearing in court. I’m asking for a system that actually assumes every citizen is innocent until proven guilty. I’m asking for a system that allows bright young lawyers who want to help protect the innocent to pursue the law career they crave while actually giving them a paycheck they can use to support a family.
Most of all, I’m talking about a justice system that lives up to its own name, and doesn’t behave like one of the crackheads it regularly screws over. Somehow we lost sight of that concept. So give old Lady Justice a shot in the arm. I don’t think it’s too much of a radical concept.