Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20131117

The man is enjoying his life. Lets not wreck it. Laugh so. Last question. Thank you for your time tonight. My question is regarding an article that Daniel Hemminger wrote for the journal. Maybe a month ago and he basically said that the strategy that republican should employ is to not attack obamacare and it would eventually fall under its own weight. This seems more realistic today than it did then and i was curious what you thought about that and personally i am skeptical because ive never seen entitlement taken away. He made that argument so i dont know if you are familiar with him but i thought you might have an opinion. Actually i concur with him. Entitlement to be taken away has to be instituted and it has to have some success in being implanted. This could be a very rocky entrance and a bombmaking or may not survive. Its not definitive and its more likely than not that it will collapse of its own weight. That has been what i was advocating during the shutdown. I thought tactically it was a mistake. There was no reason to call for the overthrow of obamacare by legislation when there is not a chance in hell that you could do that under our system. You really cant undo a law from one house of congress. There is no way it was going to be undone and we were heading into october the first when the shutdown began. It was also the day when obamacare this brandnew web site was going to revolutionize their health care signed up exactly six people. I mean, that isnt even enough to field a baseball team. There would be no outfield. [laughter] so i dont think that bodes well. Theres an old adage that i think i mentioned earlier when the other guys committing suicide, get out of the room. Hand him a pistol and maybe make it a little easier and cleaner for the csi people coming in later. But there was no reason to give it away and what republicans ought to do right now they sincerely believe as i do that obamacare is going to hurt the country it is not the way to go about attacking very specific and important problems and that is the uninsured which i think one could attack very narrowly in a way that wouldnt redo the entire 16 that the u. S. Economy. That actually is the essence of liberal overreach. Its whats wrong emanuel said. To waste when he basically said we are going to use this opportunity when we have control of the congress to instituted liberal nationalizing health care. There was no reason to reshape and remake one part of the economy as a way to attack the problem of the uninsured. I think this will in the end, it is very likely to collapse in and of its own weight in the gop has to be ready and conservatives have to be ready to address the moral issue. Its a serious one of the uninsured and we want to make sure all americans have access but there are ways to do it. There are conservative ways to do it, honest ways to do it in which you arent hiding the cost and pretending and lying about what the effects are going to be if your policy. I think that would be the essence of a conservative answer. I would say in the end that is going to be the outcome. Very likely to be the outcome and we have to be prepared to watch a dissolved and have them alternative and i think that will be relatively if we can do that in 2016. [applause] i know you have to catch a plane that i didnt want to leave without asking you a question about the past time that you love which is chess. Does chess fit into the kind of beautiful and the soft or does it fit into the lyrical . Its beautiful and the soft and elegant that i know a lot of people consider eccentric. I once drove from washington to new york to watch a chess game. Actually i did that twice. And people just shake their heads when they hear that. And i do have a comment on a pariah chess club where he described the group of us to play on monday nights at my house. Speed chess where you race against the clock. Its great fun. We are called a pariah chess club tickets at the time one of the players was Charles Murray who was not able to safely appear on campuses. The fourth of the founders was a perfectly respectable music critic for the Washington Post that he was grandfathered as the pariah because he associated with the three of us. So that was and chess is a very elegant game and there is a lot of music which i try to describe in the pros as a lot of fun but i have to admit that i gave it up a couple of years ago. I gave it up cold turkey. I was asked why and i said because its an addiction. Its a poison. You find yourself playing speed chess on the internet at 2 00 in the morning and you realize you are the equivalent of an alcoholic alone in a motel room drinking aqua velvet. [laughter] so im on the wagon or off the wagon. Ive never been able to figure out which is which but im in remission and enjoying it. [applause] thank you Charles Krauthammer for giving us a memorable evening and i think we should leave on that wonderful phrase that you used in your talk, things elegant and beautiful, hard and demanding is what life is all about. Its been a memorable evening i think for all of us and thank you president bush for being here and happy birthday mrs. Bush and thank you again Charles Krauthammer. [applause] thank you very much. Up next on booktv after words with guest host debbie hines former prosecutor and creator of illegals. Blog. This week abbe smith and angela hines contributing authors to how can you represent those people . The director and supervisor of georgetown law schools criminal defense and prisoner advocacy clinic discussed Defense Attorneys answers to the professional question they are asked most often, how they are able to do and those crimes. The program is about an hour. Host i am so glad to be able to interview you and your book, how can you represent those people . As i was telling you before, for me it was a very interesting and thought provoking book and i dont say that lightly because if it werent i wouldnt say otherwise but it was definitely brought out a lot of emotions from me, anger, sadness, laughter and humor. It takes basically ran the whole gamut so white you start happy by telling us how did you come up with the idea for the book . Guest first of all im really proud of it so im delighted that the response because there is nothing really like it out there. 15 thoughtful essays that answer the question that defense lawyers referred to alternately as either the Cocktail Party questions and that is where tens of the astra just plain the question. To have assembled such a diverse crowd was the great tang that half women a quarter africanamerican men ranging in age from 28 to 85. So the idea and that was part of the idea tooth has different voices and not the usual suspects talking about criminal law. Kind of evolved. My coeditor Monroe Freedman and i coauthored a book which is a Traditional Law school treatise on legal ethics. That was a really interesting project but it wasnt nearly as fun as this was or is timeless and its timeliness and said theres always a big case that raises that question. I think the two of us were talking about the work that we both do. We are both academics. I still consider myself to be a criminal defense lawyer just fancier gigs than when i was a public defender in Monroe Freedman had his own time where he was involved actively in criminal practice. We are both members of an Organization Called the american border of criminal lawyers so we were kind of aware that there was a need for a book like this and there is a market for it and it would he so fun to put people together to write thoughtfully and personally. I think one of the great things about the look is it has a personal voice to it. Host most of the stories and that is what makes it so interesting. They are from the heart in the stories told about the stories that come to mind from the various authors. I know there are 15 different authors that tell us about some of the people who wrote for the book. Guest her essay is one of my favorites because she talks about and i will give her a chance to talk about it she talks about the influence that her grandparents were civil rights activist hat on her career path. Some of the others include Barbara Babcock who i think of as the dean of criminal defenders certainly of the literature. She wrote something a lot of us think of as a kind of classic piece on criminal defense called defending the guilty. Its more than 30 years old now and she writes a new interesting kind of a dated essay. One of my favorite lines from her is she gets the question how can we represent those people from people like her hairdresser and for recently her oncologist. I thought that was a great line. Michael is another hero who does this work. He has represented any number of highprofile controversial defendants who has his own typically a signature. He is kind of a renaissance man and he writes about his representation with the oklahoma bombing case. Joe writes about his representation of the guantanamo detainees and authors with a brilliant essay discussion of criminal defense since September September 11 and what their policies were before and after that pivotal event. Meghan shapiro and William Montrose are the only coauthors and a write about people on death row. I think its a particularly moving very strong essay about something that most people dont realize. The clients and the clients families and the lawyers themselves. Youve really have to kind of take a part of life and put it back together to understand how a person is born in this world to do something so horrible that it seems to prompt the worst punishment of all, death by execution. Piper carrington who teaches at ole miss writes for the District Of Columbia and one of the funnier essays. He tells about his representation of the woman who he tried to send mail to take a plea and thought it was sheer craziness to go to trial in this case. She was going to get so much time and contrary to visit vice a jury finds her not guilty and its a wonderful story that i dont want to give away the punchline to. Are there others that come to mind . He writes about his experience representing people accused of crime in the role his jewish faith plays. David singleton a former public defender in new york and washington d. C. Now writes a criminal Justice Policy oriented litigation called the ohio justice and policy center and he writes wonderful essay about his efforts up sex offenders a phrase he doesnt especially like for people convicted of those kinds of defenses. He took on the state of ohios sex offender registration laws. Renting a fledgling donation funded organization to take on the powers that be and makes a strong case about how the American Public and elected officials certain kinds of crimes and when a bad crime happens its very distorting and we do all kinds of misguided things. One of the clothes he makes in the essays are policies and practices with regard to people convicted of sexual offenses makes them more dangerous. We isolate them and we marginalize them. We dont let them reintegrate into their families or communities so they become more dangerous and i think thats a smart thing to share. He has a personal voice about how he represents people who do hideous things. Host that is one of the things i wanted to explain other than it was just different age groups and races because just the compilation of people you got, it was so interesting to read their different perspectives because they really in my point of view they really werent doing the same type of representation. They were doing all types of representations but still and we will talk about some of the issues and the problems and the flaws with the system. Abbe i dont want you to do all the talking. Why do you tell us about your background and how you came to represent the clients he represents . Guest represents . Guest first of all im so pleased that abbe included me in the book. I came to this for as i was inspired by my grandfathers legacy. My grandfather was a civil rights advocate and he was he came of age in the 60s in mississippi and he was part of the naacp and the voters league. He and his family were targeted. This was before i was born. That inspired me and i went off to college and then to law school. I wanted to be a civil rights attorney. As i started to look into what kind of law i wanted to practice is spent some time in mississippi working on a classaction case on behalf of the death row inmates in mississippi and that was my first real exposure to the criminal Justice System. Later i spent a summer working at the San Francisco public defender and i saw a lot of parallels. The state is 50 africanamerican but San Francisco is less than 5 of the population yet all of our clients or a big majority of our clients were black and it ran that gambit unlike you representing people in mississippi charged with serious offenses. In San Francisco i was working on behalf of clients at every stage of misdemeanors and felonies so when i saw that i was really inspired to do this kind of work. I also spent time in the clinic when i was in law school, the juvenile defender clinic and saw that every single one of our clients was africanamerican and some of them with petty offenses as you can imagine. I tell a story about a kid who kicked a soccer ball at a Police Officer and was charged with assaulting a Police Officer and snowballs being thrown with kids being charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Those sorts of things stuck out with me. Kids gogo to schooling get in a fight at school and had the police called. That never happened at the prep school that i went to on scholarship. The police would never be called so seeing the way our criminal Justice System unfairly targets people of color and poor people is what inspired me to do this work. Host there are several takeaways i got from i think it is your chapter that the mess age ended up you and did a ding a civil rights attorney. One of the greatest civil Rights Problem we have is the mass incarceration of lacks in i was struck by one of the stories in the book about a woman who was charged with prostitution for giving a to an undercover Police Officer. Obviously she was hungry and those are people if you are on probation there are those kinds of problems. In terms of the mass incarceration issue and by way of background for people that are listening i was also struck because i have heard it worded different ways. I was struck at the fact that there are more black men particularly in jail and the criminal Justice System either waiting for trial have had a trial or that is staggering because that puts it into perspective of what we are we are talking about with mass incarceration. I talked to people and in some of the people that i talk to that are more conservative, they say black people commit more crimes. I just want to have you guys speak to the problem of mass incarceration and how do we get to it. How did we get there and what are some of the policy issues we can deal with to work towards a more just system . Guest is certainly horrifying the statistics. One in three africanamerican babies born today are destined for jail if our policies of mass incarceration continue. Its just certainly a civil rights issue of our time and a human rights issue of our time. And look at the conditions of our jails in this country are like. I think when you hear people say africanamericans are more likely to commit crimes, it really is unfair. There are neighborhoods are unfairly targeted. If you take drug use for example, africanamericans are actually less like he to use and abuse illegal substances but the chances of them going to prison and jail for committing those offenses is so disproportionate. And so when you look at these numbers there really is something that i hope these people step back and look at. Host i know eric holder is trying to at least do something with regard to lessening sentences for the nonviolent cases but beyond that and i dont know if this is your area but beyond that are there things you can do that you guys are representing people on a daytoday basis in the past but that is only assisting the system. Thats not doing anything to change the system. Guest thats a fair question and sometimes we are asked, are you really affecting social change or social justice by representing individual criminal defendants, poor people accused of a crime . I actually think and i share vidas view that criminal defense and social work is criminal justice work in human rights work. I think its a social justice work of our time because in that individual representation you are making a difference in an individual life and i think you are casting some light on a really terrible problem. We know, those of us in the trenches every day, something has to give. At a certain point. I would like to be optimistic about eric holder. I was glad that he spoke out. He probably should have spoken up sooner. I wish he would do more and i hope u. S. Attorneys around the country are doing what eric holder suggests they do it not that the quantity of drugs in the criminal charging documents and there is some flexibility in sentencing because its so harsh in the federal system especially but also in the states. I also think we are misguided and this is a more controversial thing to say because we often your people talking about releasing people from prison for committing nonviolent offenses. The truth is we keep people in for way too long for all kinds of offenses even violent offenses. People commit crimes for a host of reasons. Some art deep systemic social reasons but others are in a bad moment in a moment of rage out of impulse. There is a reason that crime seems to be disproportionately young people between the ages of 18 to 25 because studies show that our brains are not fully formed yet, that the frontal part of the brain is still growing. Thats the part that helps us to control our impulses but a lot of people do a foolish thing in a moment of loss of control and more people are dying in prisons. They are not posing a risk or danger to other people at a certain point. We spend gobs of money which raises a moral reason to let people out but we are outliers is a western democracy. There is no other country that resembles our country. They lock people up for as long time and conditions they lock people up in. I think its a little bit crazy trade i think we should prosecute fewer people and there should be no diversion. 50 years after there some kind of celebration for we marked the occasion with a bunch of hang wringing hand wringing that we have never funded criminal defense and there is a rich persons justice and poor persons justice. The cant afford it then stop persecuting so many people for such silly crimes. Treat some things as Public Health problems or social problems. Deferred them, chile divert them and dont exactly guilty plea that deal with them someplace else and lets see if we cant reintegrate people into society a little bit better. There are some neighborhoods in the District Of Columbia, some neighborhoods where you dont see young black man. He just dont see them. Its staggering and why is that . Isnt the District Of Columbia like los angeles and the rocks . There are certain places where one into africanamerican men are in the system and our law up or on probation or parole. It seems to me to be such a misguided selfdestructive set of policies. Host as you know im a prosecutor but when i prosecuted there were questions i had. I was never in juvenile but started with misdemeanor. Why am i prosecuting a guy that stole deodorant from the cbs . I even have those questions in my mind at least is a woman of color as some of the things were prosecuted as misdemeanors back then, why are we in court because he went back to the deodorant issue of . Like the woman in your book, the person who does the on the cob. You also talk about not just a system itself in terms of the actual he spoke briefly about it now and the parole system that we love people up and throw away the key. We dont really the sentences if you did the crime let them do the time but there are some times that so you tell about two persons, to clients in your buck without giving away everything but tell us about those because it does show in real life the Shawshank Redemption movement is for real. Guest i tell the story about 3 feet of, two of whom are still incarcerated for incredibly long sentences. 116 years old and that was the childish impulse kind of crime. He shot his neighbor. He had been expelled from school and was afraid of his fathers reaction so he took his fathers hunting rifle and went next door to scare the woman next door into giving him her car keys so he could get away so his father wouldnt beat the hell out of him for getting trouble at school. He had never been in trouble and wasnt someone who is involved with the juvenile Justice System. Apparently she said no, maybe left and he shot her. He is 45 years old now. He has been imprisoned since he was 16 years old. All i can say is he looks at the 45yearold, 16yearold. Theres something about him that will forever be 16 years old. I dont have any doubt that he poses no risk of harm to any other human being and this is something he is deeply remorseful about and deeply ashamed. He just doesnt want to die in prison and hangs onto a slim piece of hope that one day he will be free. I represent a woman who killed her baby. She was convicted of killing her baby. She has no memory of it. She denied it. She went to trial. I have no idea of course would have in. Its not surprising to me that a mother might dissociate if she did such a thing that she would have no memory. I think thats a terribly traumatic thing whatever the circumstances are that cause women to kill their babies but meanwhile she was supposed to serve 20 years. The judge was explicit in the sentencing and his even her a 20 year sentence. She has now served 28 years. The parole system is not letting her out. She is a model prisoner. She works in the prison infirmary and the chaplains office. She is will past the age of having babies and can do harm to them. I really just dont get it. I understand these arent popular prisoners and im standards a risk in our anticrime culture of politics but somebody needs to let these people out eventually. Youre right about the parole system in the probation system. Its become like a revolving door. Shoving people and to prison and then they get out for a second and they are back in. Why . They are not good at following rules and theyre not wellorganized. We have this appointment and that appointment and we have kids. There are days when we want to say i can control my schedule. For clients is not easy. They have their parole officer in their probation officer and they have a drug treatment and they have anger management. If they miss one of those appointments or if they dont have us money or cant figure out how to get someplace they are in violation. They lock up so many people for those kinds of technical violations falling off the wagon getting frustrated or falling into despair and turning to drugs or alcohol and then they are back in prison. I think that is awfully misguided too. Host vida im sure you have some of your own stories. What are some of the good bad and ugly things that happened in the prison system . Guest you are speaking about resources. In the misdemeanor practice i worked with a clinic with abbe and we see every day people with minor crimes and i will say 79 of crimes in our criminal justice are misdemeanor so when we talk about the criminal Justice System that is most of what we are talking about. Over and over again we see a sense of access to Substance Abuse treatment, Mental Health treatment and those would be things that would have prevented people from ever entering into the criminal Justice System in the first place. Its just so shameful in my view that you have to get arrested in order to get access to these services. When you talk about resources of those things were available the communities that are clients lipton its a lot of money incarcerating people on average 40,000 a year to incarcerate someone. The supervision and jeb treatment and Mental Health treatment to solve these problems. Host im not asking you to name them. Guest you see time and time you can pet the offenses that are being prosecuted. One of my cases a kid was prosecuted for stealing a birthday card for his little brother. Those sorts of things are happening in superior court in d. C. And all across the country. Host thats just so sad. We are basically running a court system with a lot of misdemeanors. Thats a very good point to get out the majority of the cases in the system are misdemeanor because the projection in view in the world is we have to take these murders and rapists and killers and that is what is shown in the media so that is what people really think. They are not thinking about the kid who bought the birthday card card will he didnt buy the birthday card. The kid who basically went in and stole the birthday card without thinking about that. Tell us some of the more rewarding things you have that occur. Guest you know the thing about representing a human being , that experience in and of itself can be rewarding. Standing up to someone, its next to someone in standing up to the government in and of itself can be its own reward when your client doesnt have anyone to stand up for them and doesnt have any other support. The prosecutors against them, the police are against them and there is a judge who is sort of in the middle being someones advocate is priceless. To win a jury trial or any trial is a great experience. Hearing the words not guilty are every Defense Attorneys favorite thing. Host some of the problems that the clients have oftentimes there is not even family there in the courtroom with them because of all the socioeconomic issues with perhaps their dysfunctional or otherwise family which really does bring up the point that what we need is some form of noncriminal intervention. We need more services for people which doesnt look like we are on that track but thats another topic. Guest youre absolutely right. If we can focus on the resources that we focus on the criminal Justice System elsewhere root save money and live in a safer country. Guest attention to sing to me that one of the comments in the book and weekend get up on her soapbox and talk about mass incarceration and disproportionate in certain communities. These days that is some motivation for young people doing this work but what i really like about the book is the question you just asked, its the stories about actual people that we represent. Angela hines tells a wonderful story about a juvenile in a hopeless case where the juvenile has a long record of juvenile offenses and he is going to get what they called juvenile life. She is trying to come up with some creative defense. He is in the adult jurisdiction so she tries to use a provision with no record in the interest of justice. The judge doesnt buy that and he is convicted again and she tells the story about losing and her client being sent away to an institution. She goes in the bathroom in christ and comes out of the stall to her clients mother comforts her. Its okay. Its going to be okay. I think its true of offenders. We take it to heart. I think you have to take it to heart to do this work. You have to have the personality that is open enough to be able to reach out and relate to or connect with other People Matter what. I like the bathroom story. We have all been there. Guest you fight hard for someone they know it and they think you and its just a beautiful thing about the work we do. We dont win all the time so having a client who understands how hard you work on their behalf is so rewarding. Host when i heard that story it brought me back not as a defense attorney but as a former prosecutor because the First Capital punishment case that i did not try but wanted to watch the closing arguments. During that time the defense attorney was talking because this was a pretrial i was talking and saying during the first trial when they came back with the sentence of death for his client, he couldnt keep it together so you just broke down in court and cried. His client laughed at that particular moment. Fastforward for the retrial, the client this time was the one who is actually speaking for his life and he told that story. He was saying obviously how much he had changed but he also gave their respective knowing how much his public defender had done for him and it was that emotional. Sometimes its more emotional for the attorney then it is in that moment of time for the client. Guest a lot of us have stories of our clients comfort in us. People dont get that. Thats not the picture they have of people accused of a crime. Guest i tell a story of the a client i visited on death row. He always brought us candy. Every time we would go visit because he knew it took us hours to get there. We were driving to parchment mississippi and im sure it was an enormous cost to him the prison wages being what they are to buy commissary candy and give it to us. It was just so sweet. This is a man convicted of murder. Host what are some of the lessons that you have learned from representing clients . I know there are tone of them but some of them that come to mind . Guest angela daviss essay is called there by the grace of god go i. I often stayed say to students that i feel lucky to be born in the family i was born into and get the Educational Opportunities i had. When im in a prison and the door clang shut behind me have us feeling that im really lucky. I think it teaches a kind of humility. There is another kind of humility that it teaches which is you dont win all the time. You can be a gracious loser i suppose. There is a kind of its humbling because no matter how skilled you are or diverted the water there is a randomness to justice that sometimes shakes you in your soul. I think that is the other thing. I learned that all the time, how difficult and challenging the work is and how random justice is, the kind of smallness of the role that we sometimes play. Criminal trial lawyers have the personalities. Grandiosity is probably an occupational hazard but i think its humbling in lots of ways. One of the reasons i feel so privileged to the work and our students get this in the clinic right away is what a privilege it is to be invited into another persons life at their very worst moment. They let us in and they let us try to help. Thats really rewarding and i have learned a whole lot about myself in that process. Guest i think there are a lot of lawyers who go into Corporate Law and are toiling away but when you have an actual client that you represent it makes so much easier to put in those long hours and fight on their behalf. I think some of the other lessons that this work has come to show me is these mandatory minimum sentences and incredibly long maximum sentences and would have told those are taking. Seeing that r. Crumb Justice System is basically become a system of rather than trials. 95 of cases are resolved by a plea and that is due to these incredibly punitive maximum sentences that are incredibly mandatory minimums sentences in it addition to bail statutes where people are presumed innocent and they are often detained trying to trial. That exacts the toll so innocent people plead guilty just to get back to their families and back to their jobs. D. C. Doesnt have the dell statute so doing this work in seeing what its like is really eyeopening. Guest theres this great scene in the classic movie and justice for all and which al pacino playing the criminal defense lawyer says to a less uncaring colleague, these are people. They are just people. I love that scene because i often feel they are people. They are people like anybody. Some are incredibly smart and creative and gifted and some have great leadership skills. Other people have been kind of tossed around in life but they are really just people. Present Company Excluded there are fewer of my clients that i have disliked than prosecutors for example. They are just people. Thats something to remember and unfortunately we dont think of that. In this culture for some reason we think we are about to become a thick tongue. Until someone close of those gifts to us arrested for something they did or didnt do a of code might god its a mistake. People make mistakes and they are just like us. Host the book brought back so many things for me to think about but as a former prosecutor i have not represented a lot of of and one that i did i told you earlier i representative the gentleman who was accused and ultimately did plead guilty to a sex offense charge against two young girls that were very young but when i took on the case in the family wanted me to take on the case and for some reason i couldnt convince them that i didnt think i was the person to take on the case but they kept coming back to me and i did. I had a different point of view with him when i came into the case based on my bias. I will admit is a former prosecutor but by the end of the day the case went to the system longer than usual but by the end of the day when i was standing up there with him, he was being sentenced, i had learned so much from him. It seems very simple and very trite but people are people and they do make a stakes. That is one of the things that does come out in this vote. Guest how were you able to learn that . Youve got to know him as a human being . Host i got to know him and i got to know his family. The things you talk about in your book. I got to know his family and his sisters. One was a schoolteacher and i think the other one was a schoolteacher. He was in the punitive system in baltimore. He wasnt on a note theyll status but it comes down to you got some money but do we really want to get you out or do you want to pay an attorney . You dont have money for both. Visiting with him and talking with him and talking with his employer to basic told the court he would take them back to work if the court did not give him a sentence, yeah i got to learn by talking to other people and finding out there was a back story. He had been working at the same job for 10 or 12 years. I dont recall what the joke was that he was working at the same job. He was an assistant and they knew what he did. He still would have taken him back. Those are basically the things you were talking about in the book and showing their humanity and the other side of the story. The client becomes a bigger figure. It seems that you just stand with that in terrible one dash terrible injustice but that that could beat it also the garett is one i dont remember the authors name but with Guantanamo Bay the whole islamic how has 9 11 change what is going on for the backdrop . With all those emotions one could possibly feel . I agree. I love the peace it is part about the politics there was the time during the new deal that you said we recognize that people sometimes make mistakes hall a e you have to youd discharge your debt to society but that is said and you should read make your life in and try again. There was a time he attributes first to the Dixon Administration the more fiercely through the Reagan Administration that we write off people and we wanted them to be from i s but he talks about the post 9 11 criminaljustice environment those people that we should be most afraid of, it is peculiar forever with no end in sight most are not any through a tribunal. But my personal story about the client that you meet he tells it will because in order to relate to this particular client he moved to australia and got married and raise children like many people may be to explore moving back to a religious country like afghanistan and then got swept up with a bunch of arrest and taken a and tortured and then it turns out he was innocent but what it was like it got a happy ending but most of those stories do not. I love this story because it did have an unhappy ending that they could resume the life of their family but they are still sitting there. Is there really true justice whether there isnt enough resources that they need to adequately represent behalf were like George Silberman can have money collected online therefore he could at abt animations done and expert that they could do how does money play a role . It was a huge advantage for the defense talk about mentally ill people, with those resources then there is a crisis of the public defender of this woefully underfunded. Looking of 400 cases at the time they possibly can not know the facts of all pillowcases that. Those cases. That there is a guideline how many should carry but most offices do not meet that standard. It would be hard to imagine the lawyer has six hours under those standards if you think all the things you want your lawyer to do to investigate the case and interview the quiet multiple times and then to file the motion and edward advocate that is a huge problem that i think should scare people. Of but the sequester has a people dont realize it is the exemplary. They are loyal the the laying of lawyers and taking more cases than they can properly handle and that is shameful. The department of justice those you dont know the u. S. Attorneys office seems to important so they are not under sequester but meanwhile those across the country where i used to work with the number of fantastic lawyers, these are the people they go against and what cuts the budget and resources and is pretty embarrassing so that needs to be rectified before there is a huge jolt to defendants and then to appoint the attorneys that they cost more than public defenders in terms of the amount of money spent her case. They think we dont care for criminal defendants and we do care there is a fair fight and the system seems fair and it should not work better for somebody who has money or somebody who happens to be bored. There is a growing divide but to the fairness parts i think should matter more than it does. Host and there really doesnt and that is the point i did not know about the sequester being equally applied so there is more prosecutions brought against people but less funds to defend against them. Clearly it is something wrong with that. You touched a little bit on and mentally ill. There is a definite issue their problems and represent those just as being incompetent or mentally ill in the eyes of the law but those that have personality disorders where the law does not recognize them because the law says you have choices. Had you had what about those developmental challenges the . Index this is an area with Law Enforcement those that are clearly delusional and the person is prosecuted in this is something we routinely seek with the status crimes the mentally ill people and then get the order to stay away because they dont understand then they go back to and we see that all the time. There are five times more people in Mental Health institutions and that is what we need to focus on. Case in virginia this was about two or three years ago and he was not this sadistic a form of mass murders and was reading retain the outside to go into the library. Because that is what he did every day and for whatever reason it was a holiday he could not go since he does not know that so he just sits there africanamerican probably larger in size because he does have mental challenges they tried to solicit information why are you hanging around . He goes ballistic in the words of the law he assaults the Police Officer but they could not get any resolution so he is in jail. He can fit within that category category to be adjudicated city is just now in jail for assaulting a Police Officer in clearly those are the cases we need to use fly more resources because he did not understand when the Police Officer touched him on the shoulder what that meant to him. The fairness of the system for a prosecutor but you have to be a moron needs to know that it is not fair. Really. What are some of the other challenges to get a fair trial for your client. Guest that is a really good question. We need a fair fight on both sides that would be an important source. Fact is a big question that i think there is a lot of Different Things we need to do. Host i agree that people learn not paying attention that if youre not outraged then you are not paying attention one of the first things is when they spent time in the criminal courthouse in terms of race or class like you never see a white person because every once in awhile a person involved with drugs but it does not reflect the demographic there is something wrong with that but likewise