Category: The Dish

[Megan] Another reader writes in on attorneys for the poor:

The real issue and tragedy is somewhat more nuanced, but still, ultimately, comes back to the sad mathematics of class, relative privilege, and social status. Many of these folks accused of serious crimes end up hiring private attorneys—but they get what they can afford, which usually is not the high profile, exceptionally experienced trial attorney, but someone who’s WAY out of their league defending such clients. I’ve had clients literally end up hiring a private attorney at the eleventh hour because they somehow thought that paying some guy $200.00 would somehow convince the judge that they hadn’t violated their probation by being caught with yet another crack pipe, and then testing positive for cocaine, or been charged with their fourth or fifth violation of a domestic violence protective order. In such cases, these attorneys end up having their clients plead to the same thing I was going to get them—they’re just hundreds of dollars poorer for the privilege. Where the other tragedy occurs are in rural areas, where there is no effective public defender system, and the courts end up appointing a local attorney, who might otherwise be a very competent lawyer, but due to the nature of the offense, is not competent to handle such a serious crime.

A number of readers have taken issue with my characterisation of public defenders as incompetent.  Which is not quite what I mean to say.  PD offices have multiple problems:  too many cases for each attorney, no money for help to sort through records or expert witnesses or extra tests, and the leak of experienced attorneys out of the system to places that pay better.  That doesn’t mean the attorneys are bad; it means they often don’t have the resources to mount a competent defense.  Private attorneys, at the level the poor can afford, possibly even more so.  Race is a problem in the justice system, but class dominates race, which is why OJ got off, and a number of poor white defendants don’t.

[Megan] It’s not as stupid as "Now’s the time to get those atheists!" But "It’s the fault of feminism" ranks up there with "it’s the fault of the freemasons" as one of the least convincing explanations of the Virginia Tech shootings. This is a kid who seems to have been troubled since early childhood, when his mother was worried because he wouldn’t talk–in Korea, which is not known for its ultraliberal relations between the sexes. The existence of moody, disaffected loners is not some modern creation of "hook up" cultures and anomie, and nor is the violent reaction to same. The guy in the tower at the University of Texas managed to get up there long before feminism had reared its (sensibly coifed) head on the campus dating scene.

It probably is correct to say that low-status men who aren’t getting any form the recruiting pool for mass killers. But feminism hasn’t created any more of these men than there used to be. Nor do I buy the notion that it’s deprived them of opportunities for adventure and manly self expression. I had friends who took off for parts unknown after high school, which was a while ago, but not such a long while ago that I think there’s been some gigantic sea change in the feminisation of our culture. They did manly things (even the girl) like work on salmon boats, camp in odd places while doing casual labour for food money, and backpack through Tibet. They were able to do this because they were somewhat impulsive, had a taste for adventure, and were not suffering from extreme mental illness–not because life in 1990 was so much more rugged and masculine.

[Megan] In the wake of the Virginia tech murders, there has been a lot of editorialising about gun control and mental health interventions. But I haven’t found a single editorial addressing one factor we know creates these mass murders: reporting on the mass murders. In the next few weeks and months, even over the next few years, expect to see copycat killings inspired by Cho’s actions. The more saturated the media coverage, the more such events we are likely to get. But as far as I know, few papers have taken to advocating that we cut down on news coverage of these events.

To editors, of course, the costs of such a stance are obvious. Being journalists, they automatically assume that these costs outweigh the benefits. This is not, in fact, all that obvious to me. But even if it is necessary and even good that we have European journalists sticking their microphones in every student’s face to record their opinion on gun control for posterity, while American journalists piously demand to know "What was in your heart?"–even so, it seems to me that there is one obvious step the media should take, which is not reporting anything about the killer.

I don’t know how many such killers this would stop; how much of their reward is the glee of killing, and how much the notion that they will be famous for their acts? But on the margin, it has to help; after all, Cho took out time from his busy killing schedule to mail his lunatic rantings to NBC. And the cost seems to me to be trivially low. Knowing Cho’s identity, watching his video, have told the American public nothing they needed to know. The important thing is the victims; and yet, it is the madman’s name we all know. Newspapers don’t print the names of rape victims, by general agreement, so why not perform the same service in the case of shooting sprees?

A Canadian law student writes in:

You’ve identified one of the causes of wrongful convictions, but it’s also the most expensive one to fix, and probably not one of the most important. I’m a law student in Canada, and recently finished a course on wrongful convictions.  We generally have better funding for defence lawyers here, but there have still been wrongful convictions in cases involving some of the best defence lawyers in the province.

The Innocence Project has identified the causes of some of the wrongful convictions they have exposed. In 130 cases, mistaken eyewitness identification was a factor in 101 (the next most common was false confessions, which were a factor in 35). Most wrongful convictions happen with a competent defence lawyer and an ethical prosecutor. But that won’t be much help to a wrongfully accused person in a case with a false confession and mistaken eyewitness identification.

Don’t get me wrong, insufficient funding for public defenders is a huge problem, but there are some even easier solutions to bigger problems. One change, which has been adopted already in many parts of Canada, is showing photo line-ups to accused one photograph at a time, which reduces the chance of a witness guessing the photo that looks most like the person they remember. Wrongful confessions are less likely to occur if police videotape interrogations (all of it, not just after a suspect starts confessing). Those are just two easy, and cheap, steps that would reduce the danger of wrongful convictions.

[Ross] Here’s the story. Here’s my take, from a year ago, when it first looked like this document was in the works. (The Vatican moves sloooowly.)

And as always, don’t listen to Richard P. McBrien.

Mons, Belgium, 10 am.

[Megan] There are a lot of people asking why those celebrating the release of the Duke Lacrosse players weren’t so excited about various other innocent guys who were let off after actually spending years of their lives in jail . . . poor black men, often accused of raping white women. To some extent, this is a fair point. But only to some extent. After all, the reason these guys got so much publicity in the first place is that they were white rich men accused of raping a poor black woman. That’s also, as far as I can tell, why Mr Nifong was so eager to railroad them. Had they been black men, the charges might well never have been brought, or quietly dismissed when the DNA didn’t turn out.

The real issue, I think, is not the publicity, or that we care about white people more, but that it has become very, very clear that having a good lawyer really, really matters. In this case, the victim was sufficiently unhinged, and the DNA sufficiently strong, that it probably would have been dismissed anyway; but there remains the awful, and not altogether unlikely, possibility that had they been poor (white or black) these boys would have gone to jail for a crime that pretty clearly didn’t happen. Inexperienced and overworked public defenders are no substitute for a good trial attorney. Attorney incompetence seems to be the main culprit in almost all cases where someone actually innocent goes to jail. This is intolerable. But no one wants to put real money into the public defender system.

[Megan] Yesterday I attended the GEL conference, sponsored by Creative Good, a small consulting firm that specialises in customer experience. I highly recommend the conference (registration for next year is starting now!), but it’s very difficult to explain. Basically, it’s just a series of presenters who deliver … an experience. Almost every one was brilliant, and there were no bad ones. Seriously, sign up. Just about everyone who’s ever attended the thing agrees that it’s an amazing, amazing day.

This guy, for instance, makes screensavers. Okay, yawn. No, actually, it’s fascinating. The things he programs rely on a few simple rules  to create amazingly complicated emergent patterns. It’s fractals in  action. The neatest thing he showed us was his new project, the Whitney Music Box, which combines Fibonacci sequences with harmonics. Each of the objects on the screen has its own tone, which goes off as it crosses a horizontal line. The result is emergent audio, as well as visual, patterns. At the end, he grouped us by birthdays, assigned us each a screen object, and had us make the sound as it crossed the line, which sounds dorky, in a hippie summer-camp kind of way, but in fact was really, really neat. Check out the site. It’s a great way to waste a Saturday morning.

[Megan] Quote of the day, from the ever-brilliant Alex Massie:

I’m far from unsympathetic to sensible proposals that might make it harder for the wrong sort of people to purchase guns, but the notion that gun legislation should be modeled on the sort of panicked, knee-jerk, idiocy that has become de rigeur at airports is not an idea, I think, that should be pursued. There may be a virtue in creating the impression of greater security at the expense of convenience and comfort but it’s far from clear that that is, in fact, the case.

Although I’d argue that it’s completely clear to me that most of the screening is useless flappery designed to give the appearance of security without the substance. I mean, I realise that as long as terrorists can clip their nails on a plane, America cannot really call itself free, but still . . .

[Megan] The New York Times has a piece on the new birth control pills that make you skip your period entirely. For medical reasons, I can’t take birth control pills, so the question is academic for me, but I do have friends who have thought about taking them. What I find fascinating about this piece is that the New York Times reporters found any number of granola types to give quotes like "I just feel like there’s a reason you’re getting it", and explore the allegedly complicated relationship women have with their periods. (In my experience, the relationship isn’t that complicated:  women think it sucks weasels, except for the alternatives, which are worse.) Yet they didn’t find anyone to mention the obvious reason for not taking the thing, cited by all the women I know as the dominant concern: getting your period tells you you’re not pregnant. 

No one wants to end up four months gone and contemplating a late-term abortion; leaving aside the moral issues, and even the difficulties of obtaining an abortion after the first trimester, the surgery becomes much more complicated and risky as the pregnancy advances. Nor, if they think they’d keep the baby, do they want to be suddenly scrambling to arrange their lives around a new baby in four months. But the New York Times tucks this point into a half sentence, while nattering on endlessly about side issues.