By Derwyn Bunton, guest columnist to Nola.com
“If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you.” The statement so ubiquitous today, once wasn’t familiar. Thanks to the dogged persistence of a poor, Florida drifter nearly 60 years ago, the public defender system so fundamental to criminal justice today began.
In Gideon v. Wainwright¸ the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Clarence Gideon’s constitutional rights were violated by his being denied a lawyer. Justice Hugo L. Black wrote that because of the adversary system, any accused person who cannot afford a lawyer “cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” The right to counsel means we are all entitled – rich, poor, and in between – to effective representation. The court made clear over the years a warm body or placeholder lawyer is not enough.
However, in Louisiana, the right to effective counsel is threatened by years of chronic underfunding and a user-pay funding structure that remains inadequate, unstable and unreliable. This is no surprise. The Orleans Public Defenders Office (OPD), and public defenders across the state continue to criticize and highlight the inequities in and dangers of our criminal justice system. At best an underfunded public defender system slows down court proceedings and delays justice for the accused, for victims and our entire community. At worst, it steals innocence with wrongful convictions, punishes poverty by jailing poor people unable to afford bond and erodes confidence in a criminal justice system meant to protect innocence and keep our communities safe.
In Louisiana, the promise of effective legal representation remains unfulfilled, due in large part to continued, chronic underfunding and a failure to provide public defense with resource equity. In fact, the amount invested in public defense at the state level remains inadequate, forcing the Louisiana Public Defender Board to play “whack a mole” with funding to prevent systems from going bankrupt.
----- Read more at NOLA.com
