Last Week Tonight host John Oliver says that the right to an attorney even if you can’t afford one granted 50 years ago by the Supreme Court has, in most states, become nothing more than a way for the government to milk fees out of the poorest Americans while providing sub-par legal services.
“Fifty years after the Supreme Court gave everyone the fundamental right to an attorney, even if you can’t afford one, we now have a system where the most vulnerable people are potentially being charged for access to a hideously broken system,” the satirist recently said on his show.
Oliver cited studies and reports which show that public defenders in some areas are handling more than three cases each day.
“And with case loads that heavy, public defenders cannot possibly prepare an effective defense,” he said, noting a recent study from New Orleans which revealed that public defenders in the city have an average of seven minutes to prepare a defense for each indigent client.
That, he said, leads 95 percent of poor Americans accused of crimes to plead guilty and get sacked with a mountain of court-fees and fines. Unable to pay the fines, many find themselves back in jail .
“If Law & Order reflected reality, their episodes would be pretty short,” said Oliver. “It’d basically just be, ‘How does your client plead?’ ‘Guilty, your honor.’ ”
The post Is the ‘right to an attorney’ a farce? appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/is-the-right-to-an-attorney-a-farce/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/is-the-right-to-an-attorney-a-farce/
No comments:
Post a Comment