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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Honest But Fearless Fighter: The Adversarial Ideal Of Public Defenders In 1930s And ’40s Los Angeles, Sara Mayeux
An Honest But Fearless Fighter: The Adversarial Ideal Of Public Defenders In 1930s And ’40s Los Angeles, Sara Mayeux
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Vercoe's self-description as a courtroom "fighter" illuminates public defenders' professional identity in the United States in the decades after the criminal courts had developed into a modem bureaucracy, but before the Warren Court constitutionalized criminal procedure. Historians have characterized lawyering for the poor as outside the mainstream of adversar- ial legal culture, describing a "two-tiered legal system" in which lawyers celebrated courtroom combat on behalf of paying clients but relegated the indigent to a lesser form of advocacy that valorized "compromise." Comporting with this characterization, legal scholars have portrayed early public defenders as "assembly-line" workers who conducted little factual investigation …
Effectively Ineffective: The Failure Of Courts To Address Underfunded Indigent Defense Systems, Lauren D. Sudeall
Effectively Ineffective: The Failure Of Courts To Address Underfunded Indigent Defense Systems, Lauren D. Sudeall
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This notice was posted in a Covington, Kentucky, courthouse in the late 1980s, in the hope that a lawyer might be found to defend the pending capital case of Gregory Wilson. In Covington, the statutory limit on funding for defense counsel in capital cases was $2500 and the local indigent defense program could not find a lawyer willing to defend the case for such a paltry sum. When the head of the indigent defense program asked the judge to order additional compensation to secure a defense lawyer, "the judge refused and suggested that the indigent defense program rent a river …