Ain't I A Lawyer?

Ok, I'm not, but I really think I will be soon, and a public defender too, I hope, so you can understand why I find this little story so simultaneously sad and funny. If you don't laugh you might cry, right?

And you know, there's a reason people have this misperception that public defenders are not lawyers, that they're “public pretenders,” and/or that they are somehow complicit in trying to punish their clients. That reason is that prosecutors and most legislators and public figures don't like public defenders. Defending criminals is not popular with voters, its importance doesn't fit easily into soundbites, so it is always, always dissed. And so our cultural is drowning in the message that public defenders (and all other indigent criminal defense attorneys) are somehow either incompetent or ineffective, when most of the time just the opposite is true.

Stories like The $40 Lawyer (which I will post more about soon) don't exactly help, but they present the chicken/egg question: Does media coverage like that make people think less of PDs, or does the fact that people already think less of PDs simply encourage stories like The $40 Lawyer?

Posted 11:32 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack | 3L crimlaw