Before I Go Extinct...

Much has been written about whether you can be a good person and a good defender- that is, whether it is morally acceptable to defend people who do bad things and what the personal and professional dilemmas are for those who engage in such work. 

Meanwhile, almost nothing has been written about whether you can be a good person and a good prosecutor—that is, whether it is morally acceptable to prosecute people who do bad things. At the heart of this question is the reality that prosecution inevitably leads to punishment, which, in recent times, means locking people up (especially some people) for very long periods of time, and, with increased regularity, executing them. 

- Abbe Smith: 14 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 355 (2001)

In the 1990’s, the Supreme Court of Florida dealt with a number of appellate cases, involving egregious delays for thousands of convicted defendants, where many defendants had served their prison sentences before the PD even filed the briefs to which the clients were constitutionally entitled. 

New norms at the trial level have now sunk to the point that the right to counsel for indigent people, and the system that depends on it, in Florida (and in many other jurisdictions), is a sham. As the Supreme Court of Florida has noted, “an inundated attorney may be only a little better than no attorney at all.”

THE BANALITY OF EXCESSIVE DEFENDER WORKLOAD: MANAGING THE SYSTEMIC OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE by Bennett H. Brummer