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SCOTUS to Pro Se Criminal Defendants: Screw You
In a per curiam decision, the SCOTUS ruled today in Kane v. Garcia Espitia (PDF) that pro-se criminal defendants have no right to access to legal research materials. In other words, if you want to represent yourself in a criminal matter and you're incarcerated at the time, good luck, bub.
Ok, that's not exactly what it says. So what does it say? Here are your choices:
- The decision shows how out of touch the Court is with the reality of our legal system as it applies to criminal defendants. The court said Garcia Espitia “had declined, as was his right, to be represented by a lawyer with unlimited access to legal materials.” Since when do lawyers have unlimited access to legal materials? Last I checked in most of the country you have to pay for that and some lawyers can't afford it.
- The decision shows how narrowly this Court is interpreting the 6th Amendment.
- The decision shows how the Court uses the AEDPA as another tool to avoid deciding cases it doesn't want to decide.
- The decision shows how awful the AEDPA is for criminal defendants and the Constitution.
- The decision shows the Court respecting the wishes of Congress and declining to decide and issue that has not appropriately arisen for decision.
- The decision shows something else you haven't thought of, you silly little man.
Whadyathink?
Another potentially important criminal case granted cert. today was Hammon v. Indiana in which the Indiana Supreme Court held that a victim’s oral statements to a responding officer were not testimonial and therefore did not violate the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment. If the SCOTUS agrees, this could be really good for domestic violence prosecutions and pretty bad for domestic violence defendants.
I learned about both of these cases (and another one about 911 calls that was granted cert. today) via Willamette Law Online's email summaries of breaking legal news. I highly recommend it as a way to stay up-to-date on SCOTUS news (or 9th Circuit or Oregon higher courts, if that's what floats your boat). Good stuff.
Gearing Up for 50k
So what do you do after you've finished your first marathon? Hmm... Why not start your next 50k-word novel? NaNoWriMo 2005 started today and lots of people are already off to the races. You don't need anything but a pencil and paper and a few ideas in your head to get started, but if you're like me, you have almost as much fun with the technology as you do with the writing and wow! is there ever a bunch of technology you can choose from for this “event.”
First and most important in the NaNo tech extravaganza are the writing tools. In the past I've relied on Z-Write or MacJournal to write my novels, but I'm definitely using something new this year. Z-Write hasn't really been updated in quite a while and is a little buggy and aged. MacJournal is great, but it's not really made for this purpose and it's fun to try new things. TUAW reviewed some options recently, and I'm toying with using CopyWrite. It's got lots of cool things, but especially the ability to attach notes to individual documents like chapters or character sketches. (Here's a review of CopyWrite.) Ulysses looks cool, too, but way too expensive. And then there's the Scrivener beta, which looks like the swiss army knife of writing programs. It does all that and a bag of chips, or at least it claims to, but it's beta so you have to wonder about the wisdom of trusting it with your novel. Jer's Novel Writer, appears to be free and filled with all the neato cool things like notes attached to docs and also has a supercool margin notes feature that I imagine I'd use all the time. Finally, there's this Avenir thing that looks interesting, too.
But in addition to writing tools, there are writing counters! Last year I used NaNoWriMoProMe, which makes it easy to show your progress on a blog. But I also used the NaNo Report Card, an Excel sheet that helps you track your progress in multiple ways. You can find multiple versions in that discussion thread, one of which is available here. And if that's not enough, there are more blog word-counters here.
What to do? What to do? Oh, I know, I can play w/technology options all day and not write a word!
