Yes, Virginia, They Really Are Lawyers

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

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been asked by folks accused of crime, who can’t afford to hire a lawyer, whether public defenders are lawyers like the rest of us.

They are not lawyers like the rest of us: they are in court every day, they work harder than we do, and more of them became lawyers because they believe the poorest people deserve competent representation every bit as much as the richer people who pay us. But that’s a story for another day.

This story is about members of the United States Senate who appear to believe public defenders should not be appointed federal judges because they spend too much time defending people the government accuses of crime. In other words, they spend too much time defending the Constitution of the United States of America.

I suppose that’s understandable, because these particular senators spend very little time defending that document. In fact, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz spent much of their time on and around 6 January 2021 betraying it.

Both those half-full intellects (Yale and Harvard want their law degrees back) oppose the nomination of Arianna Freeman to the federal bench because she’s spent her career at the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia.

The junior senator from Missouri, during Freeman’s confirmation hearing (now essentially on hold), complained she had the gall to “intervene” in the execution of a man who, as a teenager, murdered two men who had sexually abused him. In both cases prosecutors withheld evidence to get convictions, including of self-defense and of the sexual abuse, which jurors said had they known of it they would not have voted for the death penalty. “You argued for years,” Hawley whined, “that he shouldn’t be actually executed.” True, Freeman conceded, because he shouldn’t have been actually executed.

The politically cuckolded junior senator from Texas cast shade on where Freeman wanted to sit in the courtroom. “You could have been a prosecutor,” Cruz said, as though that were somehow loftier than a defender. “You didn’t want to be a prosecutor. You wanted to stand with the criminals.”

People who stand with the criminals — criminal defense lawyers — shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the federal judiciary, he said.

Begging the question whether lawyers like these should be allowed to serve in the Congress.