Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Grits for Breakfast

Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Report: Shortchanging indigent defense budgets diminishes constitutional rights

Dr. Tony Fabelo, one of Texas' leading criminal justice policy experts, emails to let us know about a new report, produced by a national committee on which he participated, arguing to spend new resources to shore up public defender systems and corresponding press coverage on NPR.The report goes into detail about the wide range of ways public defender systems fail poor defendants. Sometimes people don't get lawyers at all. Other times they get a lawyer who is so overworked and underpaid that there's no way the accused can get a real defense. When that happens, the system ends up with people like Alan Crotzer, a man who spent 24 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. "I was poor and indigent," said Crotzer. "I didn't have no political connections, but I was innocent...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on April 19, 2009 (boomark / email).