Letter from Inner Mongolia

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Maybe because today marks the end of Major League Baseball Spring Training that I’m reminded of a note I recently received from the only Drunk & Disorderly subscriber I know of who lives in one of China’s humorously designated “autonomous” regions. I don’t mention his name so as not to test that autonomy.

The kind gentleman said I should take a look at Balls & Strikes, which comments on, and reports about, the legal system. I did, and it’s pretty darn good.

A particularly good recent piece, written by the site’s editor in-chief Jay Willis, is about the threat to the right of a criminal defendant to be represented in court by a lawyer, whether or not the defendant has the money to pay the lawyer. The threat comes from the freshly conservatized Supreme Court itself, led by the not-so-fresh Justice who began his legal career deposing female colleagues about which one of them might have stuck pubic hair to his can of Coca-Cola.

Clarence Thomas has expressed in written dissent his opinion that the authors of the Constitution, most of whom he was too young to have met, intended only that people should have the right to hire lawyers, or to find one who didn’t mind not being paid. The free public defender, he has asserted, is the fictitious creation of a (unanimous) activist Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright; the landmark decision came exactly sixty years ago this month. Even more absurd, according to Justice Thomas, are other Court decisions extending right to counsel, to right to counsel who are any good at their jobs.

Read more in the fine Willis piece, here.

Then, get out there and play ball.