NY: 5 boroughs, one p.d. blog

An addition to the blogroll, from some real "Raising the Bar" p.d.'s:

Five Borough Defense - New York City Public Defenders

How can you tell they're real NYC p.d's? Exhibit A (which does not include my wimpy Idaho-person asterisks):

Another client coming to court every few weeks for a year because some *ssh*le called the cops. Client loses money, promotions. The DA calls at 9pm the night before trial and asks if the client wants an ACD. Client does not want an ACD. Then, on the day of trial, the DA dismisses...

NY: "tattooed bikers, a dog's best friends"

Uplifting tales of tattooed Americans helping animals in need, from the New York Times:

Heaven’s Angels

Clad in leather, inked to the hilt in skulls and dragons, with images of bloodied barbed wire looped about their necks, they shared something else — a peculiar tenderness for animals, and the intensity needed to act on the animals’ behalf when people abuse them...

About a year ago, they took up the name Rescue Ink, and now work full time investigating cases of animal abuse...

Nothing peculiar about that; admirable in fact.

Art is my weapon, court - appointed lawyers are my targets

Remember, "HELL has no furry" like a public defender hater with a camera phone:

NOBODY Goes To Court To Support AVONE

Big screed. Lots of surreptitious in-court photos. Poor Avone.

"When you hear hoofbeats behind you"

Heading to trial and stuck with a defense that just doesn't make sense? Read "Loser Truth" at Simple Justice first.Because "sometimes there really is a zebra behind you."

See also "My Truth is No Better Than Your Truth" from a public defender.

NY: "soon, no one will be cut off from their family..."

Good news for New York prisoners and their families, from Newsday:

Spitzer orders high prisoner collect-call fees to end

A $3 surcharge on collect calls made by prisoners to their families was eliminated by the Spitzer administration Monday...

Spitzer: Prison calls' cost to drop

New York families who regularly get phone calls from loved ones behind bars were ecstatic yesterday when Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that calls from prisons will soon be a lot cheaper. Spitzer said he is eliminating a "tax" that hikes the cost of the collect calls and gives the state a 58 percent kickback on the cost of each call...

And from DMI Blog:

Spitzer overturns controversial Pataki-era policy: no more excessive phone charges for families calling their incarcerated loved ones

"As a public defender in the Bronx, I have seen time and time again the role that maintaining contact with a loved one while he or she is in prison plays in reducing recidivism rates and in the general health of families and communities..."

"Shovel brigade"

Judging Crimes has some good reflections prompted by the recent NY Times series on small-town justice:

There's a disillusioning moment in every young lawyer's life. It happens when she stands at the podium, and clinches her argument with an unanswerable point, and looks up at the imposing figure in the black robe, and there's no light in the judge's eyes, just the blank impassive stare of the diplomat waiting for the translation through his headphones...

In my experience, the worst appellate judges tend to be highly successful lawyers who retire into a prestigious judgeship as the capstone of a career...

When those lawyers become appellate judges at an advanced age, and are asked to decide their first criminal cases, they begin with the assumption that any field so dominated by sub-optimal lawyers needs the touch of a high-class professional to set things right. So you get ignorant, sweeping decisions intended to tidy things up...

In my experience, you can find this at the trial court level too.

NY: "clients as people, not just criminal defendants"

From Changing the Court - "A chronicle of how a group of planners and practitioners are attempting to change the Bronx court system's approach to low-level criminal offending.":

Working with the Defense Bar

As Aaron (Mysliewiec, an attorney at Bronx Defenders) said, describing his office's approach, "I can’t guarantee an outcome, but I can guarantee that my client has a lawyer who will listen".

Overall, a new blog of interest to us public defender types.

But then you may want to follow the good news of community solutions with Indefensible's David Feige's grain of salt.

Low pay, happy lawyer

You know what's fantastic about putting up your own criminal defense blog? Do it long enough, and someone you admire as much as Ray Ward sends you e-mail! And not just e-mail, he sends you material and links!

From the proprietor of Minor Wisdom:

Skelly, I think this story is on your beat.

Ambrogi's headline is "Low pay, big cases, happy lawyer."

He links to a story on the NY Times that begins:

"THERE are many kinds of lawyers. Some defend the vilified, like mobsters and disgraced congressmen. In return, the lawyers can win money and fame.

But others defend the forgotten — tenants, busboys, people at the wrong end of a police truncheon — and are themselves forgotten..."

The article is about Ray Brescia, director of the community development project at the Urban Justice Center in Manhattan:

It is rewarding work, he says, for a "behind-the-scenes guy."

(In return, let me send you back to Minor Wisdom to read this post: "Depression and the Connecticut bar." Mr. Ward owns this topic among the blawgs, and his frequent posts on it are a source of personal help to me. Thank you, counselor.)

NYC shiv-aree

In New York, an event like this seems not to be considered a major news item:

Lawyer stabbed as murder defendant leaves B'klyn court:

A man on trial in the killing of a 21-year-old college student used a homemade weapon to stab his defense attorney while his co-defendant reached for a court officer's gun...

Yeah, the p.d. brethren in Brooklyn are tough.

"What not to say at sentencing"

Here's Indignant Indigent with breaking legal news from New York, "proving once again that a defendant's right to address the sentencing court is not all it is cracked up to be."

NYPD - RNC: interview with a wrongfully-arrested bystander

Never mind the Chomskyites; Democracy Now had an interesting set of interviews today featuring Alexander Dunlop, arrested during the Republican national convention, whose charges were dropped when videotape was produced that contradicted the police:

I was trying to go to my favorite sushi place... And I could see that I was blocked in. So, I asked a police officer, I said, “How do he get out of here?” And he pointed south toward 9th Street. And he said, “Well, you walk over there.” So I started walking over there, and I got up there, and I realized there was no exit point. And I turned around to find him again, and he said, “Well, I just asked you to go up here so I could arrest you.”

Here is Eileen Clancy, a member of I-Witness video, a project that assembled hundreds of videotapes shot during the RNC:

So I called his attorney right away, Michael Conroy, and said, “I have your guy on tape in a couple of places, including the arrest...” I said, “Well, let's take a look at your tape.” And I said, “Gee, it looks an awful lot like my tape. Well, I wonder what the problem is.” So we kept looking. I thought, “Maybe there's two cameras that are nearby. It just looks the same.” But he said, “But what you are describing is not on my tape.”

And defense attorney Michael Conroy:

This was a police tape that was... represented to me to be the complete unedited tape of the incident... That tape showed the demonstration....Then, the tape pans to the ground... Unfortunately, ...that's the point which Alex should be on the tape. It’s the point in which he is on the official tape that I was never given, and it shows that Alex is actually approaching a police officer to ask for directions, ...and it shows Alex being arrested very calmly, very quietly and not resisting arrest, and obviously, those are two key pieces that had I had earlier, I would have had a much better fight with the District Attorney's office to get this dismissed in the fall as opposed to eight months later.

You can read and listen to the interviews, plus a response by Paul Browne, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information here.

You can read more blawg commentary on Crime and Federalism, Discourse.net, and Objective Justice.

Cop shop talk, p.d. PTSD

Even if I don't always like cops, I like a good cop story, and if the teller is New York Irish like my mother-in-law, so much the better.

Friday I'm driving home on Pacific Ave. in the commuter pick-up, listening to Fresh Air on KPLU, and the guest is Edward Conlon, author of the memoir Blue Blood, which begins with his first days on the street as an NYPD and goes back three generations.

If you like this sort of thing, you can listen to him here.

After a few blocks, Conlon gets to "just about the most terrible thing that I've seen" and I pull over:

"There was this old woman who was on a bed. She was emaciated. There was what you recognize as a DOA smell. A couple of the paramedics were crying... They were lifting her off that plastic sheet and then she started to moan. There were maggots all over her. Maggots only eat dead tissue, so she was dying bit by bit. The really terrible thing was that she didn't live alone."

There was this old woman in Twin Falls, Idaho. She was dying bit by bit. There were maggots. Her son who shared the house with her was charged with felony abandonment of a vulnerable adult. The brilliant young associate to whom I assigned the appellate brief quit, and later blogged about how the case horrified him, and was part of the reason that he left criminal law.

I was trial counsel. We waived the jury and lost anyway. He went to prison. She died. The Idaho Court of Appeals opinion is here (PDF file).

Who knows how our jobs corrode us, or the ways we might pay for the roles we play. In the morning, I'm going to hug my wife and kid and go with them to Mass.

How can we miss you if you won't leave?

"There is some confusion" as to who is the public defender of Greene County, New York.

Greg Lubow declared Monday that he is still the county public defender, claiming the county illegally appointed an interim successor. County Attorney Carol Stevens, however, said Lubow should "cease and desist" calling himself the public defender.

She added that despite threats from Lubow, Assistant Public Defender Jon Kosich took the interim position and by doing so prevented a fiasco when the courts came back into session after the New Year. Depending on who you ask, Lubow's term either expired on December 31, or is still going strong.

Things are no less confused over in the Venango County, PA, public defenders office. The local paper reports cryptically that "(t)here are indications that chief public defender John C. Lackatos and assistant public defender Paul Yessler have resigned from their positions."

"Officials are mum regarding the status of Lackatos, who has served as chief public defender for about two years.... State police have charged Lackatos in connection with a hit-and-run crash Dec. 18 in Sandy Creek Township."

The poor dumb p.d. has been charged with accident involving damage to an attended vehicle or property, accident involving personal injury, driving on a roadway laned for traffic, reckless driving, duty to give information or render aid, period for required lighting, notice of change of address and two counts of failure to give immediate notice of an accident to police. One can imagine the glee of local authorities as they piled on the charges.

How arraignments look from on high

The New York Times and the Times of London both drop in on public defenders doing arraignments in New York City, in Manhattan and the Bronx.

The P.D. in the Bronx observes,"The thing is, if this happened where I grew up, in the suburbs around Boston, then it would get dealt with in the principal’s office."

Which is exactly how I'll feel covering Juvy tomorrow.