Letter from Roanoke

Fay Spence is a former federal public defender who cares deeply about the law, and about the people the law tries hard to crush. She’s been crushing back for more than thirty years. She wrote last month to tell me about a piece she’d published with three colleagues in The Federal Lawyer.

It’s about medical care (“such as it is,” she writes) in the federal Bureau of Prisons.

“Prisoners have a constitutional right to adequate medical care,” the article begins, “but what that means and how to get needed treatment are often not well understood by attorneys representing criminal defendants.”

She and her colleagues try hard to repair that misfortune.

Her article arrived in plenty of time for the April edition of Drunk & Disorderly, but unfortunately looking for that particular edition has sometimes proved, over the years, a fool’s errand.

Fortunately, though, we’re now into May, and so, at last, it’s here.