O Lawyer, Where Art Thou?
It would be nice if the below didn’t have to happen, but heck, at least some people are trying to fix things. That is more then can be said for our elected leaders. Slate reports:
Law firms are the cavalry of the legal world. Disaster strikes, and the firms, with their thousands of lawyers and millions of dollars, ride into town to clean up the mess.
But what happens when the cavalry doesn’t show?
That’s the situation in New Orleans, where almost two years after Katrina, the criminal-defense system is still in a state of emergency. Public defense was never the city’s strength: When the levees broke, there were about 7,000 criminal defendants waiting to see a state-appointed lawyer. Immediately after the storm, the city jailed roughly 5,000 of them, many on shaky legal grounds. Most remained locked up for over a year before speaking with a lawyer. The public defender’s office is slowly working through the backlog, but is still overwhelmed. It’s a situation public defenders bitterly call "Gitmo on the Bayou."
In response to the crisis, more than 2,700 law students traveled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, on trips a bit reminiscent of the famous civil rights freedom rides. The students do just about everything but appear in court, including interviewing defendants and collecting evidence. Public defenders from different parts of the country took sabbaticals from their day jobs to come down as well. But however welcome, this is as effective as washing the bathroom floor with a toothbrush, say New Orleans public defenders. Eventually, you’ll clean up the mess, but a mop could take care of the problem a whole lot faster.
At points the story takes several turns to the nasty and mentions that much more could be done, and of course it should be. But the blame is based more on the "Big Law Firms" and why they are not doing more. Now I am no fan of "Big Law Firms" but it isn’t their job. If our resources at the FBI and the US Department of Justice were not being diverted 24/7 to the war on terror they could/should be the people helping to rebuild the justice system in New Orleans.
