The quality of lawyering in defense cases often leaves just about everything to be desired. States are cutting back on funding for legal aid lawyers. Lawyers tell me, anecdotally, that public defenders seem to be getting both younger and older. Murder cases are being handled by lawyers who have never dealt with a capital crime before. Not infrequently, older lawyers have been known to sleep through substantial parts of trials, miss court dates, and fail to file documents -- even last-minute motions -- on deadline.
Most of the court cases in the US take place in State (or lower) Courts, not in the Federal Justice System. That means that, as a country, we have a patchwork of different rules, regulations, procedures, and sentences.
While large law firms are keeping up the pace of their pro bono work, some are beginning to try to put distance between their firms and certain kinds of pro bono work -- for example, defending Guantanamo Bay detainees before Military Commissions. Their reason is that the current Military Commission law represents a system that has never been tried and which has virtually no track record.
And then there was this from John Thompson's letter: "The prosecutors at my trials hid evidence of my innocence." For me, this is the most egregious part of Thompson's letter.
Here's what it means, according to USA TODAY:
The jurors who helped put Nino Lyons in jail for three years had every reason to think that he was a drug trafficker, and, until July, no reason to doubt that justice had been done. For more than a week in 2001, the jurors listened to one witness after another, almost all of them prison inmates, describe how Lyons had sold them packages of cocaine. One said that Lyons, who ran clothing shops and nightclubs around Orlando, even tried to hire him to kill two drug suppliers.
But the federal prosecutors handling the case did not let the jury hear all the facts. Instead, the prosecutors covered up evidence that could have discredited many of Lyons' accusers. They never revealed that a convict who claimed to have purchased hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Lyons struggled even to identify his photograph. And they hid the fact that prosecutors had promised to let others out of prison early in exchange for their cooperation.
Prosecutors have immense power. And their abuse of that power is not just a once-in-a-while transgression. It happens all the time and usually goes unnoticed -- how do you see something that's not there?
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