andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> I am stlll steaming about Jenny's slur against the
> profession.
Probably the quality of defense offered by public defenders as well as private attorneys to criminal defendants varies both from state to state but also from community to community within a state. After a young black student here had received miserable defense in a case in which he was accused of robbery (it being an obvious frame-up by a notorious officer of the Normal Police Dept.), he received a superb defense and a directed verdict of acquittal in a second case (burglary) in which he was almost certainly guilty!
Difference: After the first case his mother got in touch with a fellow factory worker who happened to belong to a local red group we had established in the early '70s. It was a devilishly cold winter, but we managed to get a few leaflets distributed, wrote a couple of letters, and (most important of all, I suspect) we provided an audience in the courtroom -- a very tiny one of less than half a dozen, but an audience nevertheless. And the public defender was obviously inspired by that audience. There had been very sloppy police work in keeping track of a finger print, and he really nailed the testifying officer on it.
Carrol
P.S. At the time Jan & I were playing bridge with a state-farm lawyer and his wife, and we learned from him that the scuttlebutt around the court house was that there would have been a conviction were it not for those outside "gunslingers" on the case!!! The whole damn thing (including a cop widely known to beat his wife and on record as wishing for the good old days when no black person was allowed overnight in Normal) could have gone with very little change into a comic crime novel. (Later on a public defender at the appeals level got the first conviction reversed, the student transferred to another college, and I understand has led a very calm life since then.)