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: Capital Defense Weekly

shredding liberty’s safety net

By Karl R. Keys, Esq.

ABC News looks at the wholesale slashing of Public Defender budgets in a must read piece available online: Statewide public defenders in Kentucky and Minnesota< and local offices in cities such as Atlanta and Miami say budget cuts are forcing them to fire or furlough trial lawyers, leaving the offices unable to handle misdemeanor and, in some instances, serious felony cases. The cuts leave states scrambling to find a solution to a constitutional dilemma: The Sixth Amendment requires the government to either provide poor defendants with lawyers or release them. “It is an impending legal crisis in our state,” Joseph Lambert, the chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court, told ABC News. The conflicts have prompted at least one lawsuit, brought on Wednesday by several criminal suspects in Atlanta who may temporarily be without lawyers, and could result in some public defenders being held in contempt of court...continue to full post

Full post as published by Capital Defense Weekly on June 13, 2008 (boomark / email).