Gideon's Broken Promise

Gideon's Broken Promise PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781590314685
Category : Legal assistance to the poor
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
During the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright (which established the right to counsel in state court proceedings for indigents accused of serious crimes), the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants held a series of public hearings to examine whether Gideon's promise is being kept. Throughout 2003, extensive testimony was received from expert witnesses familiar with the delivery of indigent defense services in 22 states representing a wide cross-section of regions, populations, and delivery systems. This comprehensive report represents the culmination of a painstaking analysis of hundreds of pages of testimony compiled from the hearings, leading to the inescapable conclusion that, forty years after Gideon, the promise of equal justice for the poor remains unfulfilled in this country.

Gideon's Broken Promise

Gideon's Broken Promise PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781590314685
Category : Legal assistance to the poor
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Get Book

Book Description
During the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright (which established the right to counsel in state court proceedings for indigents accused of serious crimes), the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants held a series of public hearings to examine whether Gideon's promise is being kept. Throughout 2003, extensive testimony was received from expert witnesses familiar with the delivery of indigent defense services in 22 states representing a wide cross-section of regions, populations, and delivery systems. This comprehensive report represents the culmination of a painstaking analysis of hundreds of pages of testimony compiled from the hearings, leading to the inescapable conclusion that, forty years after Gideon, the promise of equal justice for the poor remains unfulfilled in this country.

Gideon's Promise

Gideon's Promise PDF Author: Jonathan Rapping
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807064629
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A blueprint for criminal justice reform that lays the foundation for how model public defense programs should work to end mass incarceration. Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society. Public defenders represent over 80% of those who interact with the court system, a disproportionate number of whom are poor, non-white citizens who rely on them to navigate the law on their behalf. More often than not, even the most well-meaning of those defenders are over-worked, under-funded, and incentivized to put the interests of judges and politicians above those of their clients in a culture that beats the passion out of talented, driven advocates, and has led to an embarrassingly low standard of justice for those who depend on the promises of Gideon v. Wainwright. However, rather than arguing for a change in rules that govern the actions of lawyers, judges, and other advocates, Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment and training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society. Through the story of founding Gideon’s Promise and anecdotes of his time as a defender and teacher, Rapping reanimates the possibility of public defenders serving as a radical bulwark against government oppression and a megaphone to amplify the voices of those they serve.

Yale Law Journal

Yale Law Journal PDF Author: Yale Law Journal
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610278844
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
"Symposium: The Gideon Effect: Rights, Justice, and Lawyers Fifty Years After Gideon v. Wainwright." The year 2013 marks the golden anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which established a constitutional right to counsel for criminal defendants. A half century later, there remains a compelling need for a reexamination of its legacy, extensions, shortfalls, and long shadow over other areas of law such as immigration and custody disputes. This special Symposium issue of the Yale Law Journal is, in effect, a new and extensive book on this important subject, featuring contributions by internationally recognized legal and political scholars. It is one of the most thorough, detailed, and wide-ranging analyses of the current standing and reach of what may be the Court's most important criminal law decision. The contributors are: Rebecca Aviel, John H. Blume & Sheri Lynn Johnson, Stephen B. Bright & Sia M. Sanneh, Paul D. Butler, Jeanne Charn, Erwin Chemerinsky, Gabriel J. Chin, Martha F. Davis, Ingrid V. Eagly, Roger A. Fairfax Jr., Bruce A. Green, M. Clara Garcia Hernandez & Carole J. Powell, Emily Hughes, Kevin R. Johnson, Neal Kumar Katyal, Nancy J. King, Nancy Leong, Justin F. Marceau, Hope Metcalf & Judith Resnik, Pamela R. Metzger, David E. Patton, Eve Brensike Primus, L. Song Richardson & Phillip Atiba Goff, Jenny Roberts, and Carol S. Steiker. The issue, the eighth and final one of academic year 2012-2013, also includes a cumulative Index to the eight issues of Volume 122. As with previous digital editions of the Yale Law Journal available from Quid Pro Books, features include active Tables of Contents (including links in each Essay's own table), linked footnotes and URLs, and proper ebook formatting.

Rights at Risk

Rights at Risk PDF Author: David K. Shipler
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307947009
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
An enlightening, intensely researched examination of violations of the constitutional principles that preserve individual rights and civil liberties from courtrooms to classrooms. With telling anecdote and detail, Pulitzer Prize–winner David K. Shipler explores the territory where the Constitution meets everyday America, where legal compromises—before and since 9/11—have undermined the criminal justice system’s fairness, enhanced the executive branch’s power over citizens and immigrants, and impaired some of the freewheeling debate and protest essential in a constitutional democracy. Shipler demonstrates how the violations tamper with America’s safety in unexpected ways. While a free society takes risks to observe rights, denying rights creates other risks. A suspect’s right to silence may deprive police of a confession, but a forced confession is often false. Honoring the right to a jury trial may be cumbersome, but empowering prosecutors to coerce a guilty plea means evidence goes untested, the charge unproved. An investigation undisciplined by the Bill of Rights may jail the innocent and leave the guilty at large and dangerous. Weakened constitutional rules allow the police to waste precious resources on useless intelligence gathering and frivolous arrests. The criminal courts act less as impartial adjudicators than as conveyor belts from street to prison in a system that some disillusioned participants have nicknamed “McJustice.” There is, always, a human cost. Shipler shows us victims of torture and abuse—not only suspected terrorists at the hands of the CIA but also murder suspects interrogated by the Chicago police. We see a poverty-stricken woman forced to share an attorney with her drug dealer boyfriend and sentenced to six years in prison when the conflict of interest turns her lawyer against her. We meet high school students suspended for expressing unwelcome political opinions. And we see a pregnant immigrant deported, after years of living legally in the country, for allegedly stealing a lottery ticket. Often shocking, yet ultimately idealistic, Rights at Risk shows us the shadows of America where the civil liberties we rightly take for granted have been eroded—and summons us to reclaim them.

Rebooting Justice

Rebooting Justice PDF Author: Benjamin H. Barton
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039348
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
America is a nation founded on justice and the rule of law. But our laws are too complex, and legal advice too expensive, for poor and even middle-class Americans to get help and vindicate their rights. Criminal defendants facing jail time may receive an appointed lawyer who is juggling hundreds of cases and immediately urges them to plead guilty. Civil litigants are even worse off; usually, they get no help at all navigating the maze of technical procedures and rules. The same is true of those seeking legal advice, like planning a will or negotiating an employment contract. Rebooting Justice presents a novel response to longstanding problems. The answer is to use technology and procedural innovation to simplify and change the process itself. In the civil and criminal courts where ordinary Americans appear the most, we should streamline complex procedures and assume that parties will not have a lawyer, rather than the other way around. We need a cheaper, simpler, faster justice system to control costs. We cannot untie the Gordian knot by adding more strands of rope; we need to cut it, to simplify it.

Supreme Inequality

Supreme Inequality PDF Author: Adam Cohen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735221529
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
“With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

The Trouble with Lawyers

The Trouble with Lawyers PDF Author: Deborah L. Rhode
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190217227
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
By any measure, the law as a profession is in serious trouble. Americans' trust in lawyers is at a low, and many members of the profession wish they had chosen a different path. Law schools, with their endlessly rising tuitions, are churning out too many graduates for the jobs available. Yet despite the glut of lawyers, the United States ranks 67th (tied with Uganda) of 97 countries in access to justice and affordability of legal services. The upper echelons of the legal establishment remain heavily white and male. Most problematic of all, the professional organizations that could help remedy these concerns instead jealously protect their prerogatives, stifling necessary innovation and failing to hold practitioners accountable. Deborah Rhode's The Trouble with Lawyers is a comprehensive account of the challenges facing the American bar. She examines how the problems have affected (and originated within) law schools, firms, and governance institutions like bar associations; the impact on the justice system and access to lawyers for the poor; and the profession's underlying difficulties with diversity. She uncovers the structural problems, from the tyranny of law school rankings and billable hours to the lack of accountability and innovation built into legal governance-all of which do a disservice to lawyers, their clients, and the public. The Trouble with Lawyers is a clear call to fix a profession that has gone badly off the rails, and a source of innovative responses.

Ordinary Injustice

Ordinary Injustice PDF Author: Amy Bach
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429984279
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"A groundbreaking book . . . revealing the systemic, everyday problems in our courts that must be addressed if justice is truly to be served."—Doris Kearns Goodwin Attorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. What she found was an assembly-line approach to justice: a system that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who habitually declines to pursue significant cases; the court that works together to achieve a wrongful conviction. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Ordinary Injustice reveals a clubby legal culture of compromise, and shows the tragic consequences that result when communities mistake the rules that lawyers play by for the rule of law. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible—the first and necessary step to reform.

The State of Criminal Justice 2007-2008

The State of Criminal Justice 2007-2008 PDF Author: Victor Streib
Publisher: American Bar Association
ISBN: 9781590319833
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


Comprehensive Criminal Procedure

Comprehensive Criminal Procedure PDF Author: Ronald Jay Allen
Publisher: Aspen Publishing
ISBN: 1543819605
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 2572

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Book Description
Comprehensive Criminal Procedure, Fifth Edition is perfect for all introductory courses in criminal procedure law (including both investigation and adjudication courses, as well as comprehensive and survey courses). The casebook focuses primarily on constitutional criminal procedure law, but also covers relevant statutes and court rules. The casebook is deliberately challenging—it is designed for teachers who want to explore deeply not only the contemporary state of the law, but also its historical and theoretical foundations. The casebook incorporates a particular emphasis on empirical knowledge about the real-world impacts of law-in-action; the significance of race and class; the close relationship between criminal procedure law and substantive criminal law; the cold reality that hard choices sometimes must be made in a world of limited criminal justice resources; and, finally, the recognition that criminal procedure law always should strive to achieve both fairness to the accused and justice for society as a whole. New to the Fifth Edition: Cutting edge developments in caselaw, statutory material, and academic commentary An important reordering of certain areas of the Fourth Amendment and related materials that make them even more user-friendly Insightful examination of the turmoil in the modern Fourth Amendment cases as the Supreme Court, notably splintered over the appropriate methods of interpreting the Constitution, faces the implications of rapidly changing technology. The latest in case law, statutory material, and academic commentary about due process, the right to counsel, pretrial practice, guilty pleas, trial rights, sentencing, double jeopardy, and post-trial procedures Increased emphasis on the role of prosecutorial decision-making An updated treatment of the critical role of plea bargaining A new section on forfeitures and the Eighth Amendment Professors and students will benefit from: A rigorous and challenging criminal procedure casebook with careful presentation and editing A prestigious author team that incorporates the latest and most highly respected developments in legal scholarship in the field of criminal procedure law An appropriate balance of explanatory text and secondary material Thematic organization structured around important main themes Extensive revisions and updates A casebook that is the only criminal procedure casebook on the market today that enables students to understand the roots of the modern controversy over privacy and security in a digital age