Ever Considered an ER Doc as an Expert Witness?

I recently stumbled on the NAPD website, and was impressed. I'm now a new member of NAPD, and I wanted to thank all of you for what you do! As an emergency physician who has periodically worked with public defenders […]

Serving Our Children

I recently had the opportunity to attend and speak at a right to counsel symposium at the University of Tennessee.  The topic I was speaking about was the right to counsel for children.  I would like to share those comments with the […]

Free Your PC

Free, Open Source Software (F/OSS) is to computing as public defense is to criminal justice: unappreciated, often unknown among the general public; the workhorse dedicated to freedom, both in reality and in principle. Yet, ironically, the public defense community lags behind […]

Designed to Fail – The 1996 FBI Analysis of Flaws in Lab Analysis and Its Relevance Today

If you were to design a process to ensure that false and misleading testimony and reports received at trial that may have led to wrongful convictions were discovered and disclosed to the necessary parties to right the wrongs, what would […]

Those Ain’t no “Crime” Crimes: Part 1

Watching court one day in New Orleans, I listened to a judge address an indigent defendant as a repeat offender. “Your honor,” protested the public defender, “My client has never been convicted of a crime – all of those charges […]

Serial: The Podcast

I’ve come across dozens of bits of evidence like this. Information that could mean one thing or perhaps its opposite depending on who’s talking…All this information, every scrap, it’s currency for whatever side you’re on. It’s spin. And the trouble […]

Is there a war on poor people?

“You know, Mr. Lewis, these people won’t respect you since you are not charging them anything.  You should have them wash your car or something.” So said Judge James Chenault, Madison Circuit Court judge for over three decades. This was said […]

The Importance of Community

Recently, I had the pleasure of spending a week working with and surrounded by a top notch faculty, as well as a group of approximately 30 energetic, passionate, client–centered public defenders from around the State of Louisiana; talented, energized, and […]

Tennessee undermines own values in providing counsel to the poor

Pleading the Sixth: Tennessee has a grand tradition of holding almost every government function directly accountable to the electorate. However, a major structural flaw in how the state’s indigent defense budget is requested, defended and allocated between the state’s elected public […]

Rising Tide: Louisiana Campaign for Equal Justice

Louisiana’s public defenders are overworked and underfunded.  This is no surprise for the perennial world leading jurisdiction in both incarceration and exoneration rates per capita.  Despite installing an admirable statewide structure with the Louisiana Public Defender Act in 2007, the present funding structure cannot meet the […]