Yesterday’s New York Times had a depressingly bleak story cataloguing all the problems with Georgia’s chronically underfunded public defender system, in which former state Supreme Court justice Arthur Fletcher made the statement above. The article was prompted by a recent Georgia Supreme Court ruling that a death penalty defendant should have accepted the public defenders appointed for him by now-resigned Fayette County Judge Johnnie Caldwell after the money to pay his court-appointed lawyers ran out, even though the prosecutor handpicked those particular PDs for him and even though the PDs tried three times to withdraw because they lacked experience defending capital cases or any funds for experts or investigation.
The Weis case will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, who in all likelihood will decline to hear it, leaving our public defender system broke and broken until the lawmakers of this state are finally legally forced to change it. When will that be? Probably not anytime soon. The only proposals coming out of the legislature about indigent defense seemed designed to further cripple the system, not fix or fund it. Georgia’s Republican lawmakers probably correctly assume that fixing the public defender and indigent defense systems is not an issue that will help them appear tough on crime, and the opposition Democrats aren’t exactly jumping over each other to champion the cause.
But someone needs to start asking the Attorney General candidates, the gubernatorial candidates, and candidates for State House and Senate what they are going to do to fix the broken indigent defense system. I am going to start asking the question if nobody else will. I want to know what Teilhet and Hodges think and will do about it, what Baker and Barnes think and will do about it, what the primary challengers of some longtime do-nothing state Representatives and Senators think and will do about it. Who will have the principle and the strength to take a stand and push for reform? If they won’t do that simple thing, from this point forward they will not receive my vote.
If state lawmakers continue to turn a blind eye and rely on the appellate courts to bail them out with bad rulings, they will not only be committing a constitutional atrocity but will also, at some point, push it so far that even the conservatively-skewed Supreme Court will have to stand up and take notice. Will it take an obviously probably guilty murderer being set free because the state simply failed to provide him with even the minimum indigent defense and speedy trial guaranteed him by the constitution, before state lawmakers finally realize that they can’t adopt willful blindness as their method of dealing with the broken system? Do we need to continue to be held up to the rest of the country as an example of the sad, backwards-ass south with its blatant disregard for the rule of law or basic principles of justice?
I’d ask if anyone even cares that the system as presently constructed allows people to rot in jail without a lawyer for over 5 years before they can even get into a courtroom to proclaim their innocence and ask for a trial date, let alone face a jury of their peers, but sadly I already know the answer. Just because it outrages me does not mean it outrages the masses who assume cops never make mistakes and an arrest might as well be a guilty verdict. But it should. We are better than we sound in yesterday’s New York Times…or at least we should aspire to be.
Leave a Reply