Thursday, 18 December 2014

Act quickly or our freedoms will be lost

This blog has been sometime in gestation and I have had to think about it carefully as one thing that I want to achieve in this blog is not to offend any of my readers. So here goes my voyage into controversy.

My first source is the New Yorker; look at the brilliant cover on the issue before last. Well the New Yorker has frequent articles about the American justice system, frequently highlighting miscarriages of justice or the simple unfairness endemic in the system in some parts of the United States. Those articles are most frequently about the Deep South particularly Alabama and Mississippi.

The particular article that caught my attention was the sentencing to death of a young man for a drive by shooting. The circumstances were somewhat dubious, but that is not the point. Most people facing trial in Alabama are poor and cannot afford legal representation but are allocated a lawyer by the state. The problem is that this does not necessarily mean a trial lawyer, in the case of the defendant he was allocated a tax lawyer, yes a tax lawyer for somebody facing a complex capital trial. Now there are many other disturbing aspects of this particular but these are not pertinent to our argument, the tax lawyer simply had neither the experience nor knowledge to represent a client facing in Alabama the electric chair.

The second strand comes from a solicitor friend of mine with whom I discussed Legal Aid. There are huge changes afoot, so not only will the qualifying threshold for Legal Aid be extremely low, but also the quality of the lawyer allocated to you may not be what you would have chosen. In North Yorkshire there will be a small number (four I think), of legal firms contracted to offer legal aid. Of course they will be contracted on the basis of cost rather than quality and certainly not local knowledge. It will also be provided by the usual cast of out-source “partners”. So effectively a low cost legal factory rather than a skilled practitioner will represent you.


So whereas we tend to look rather condescendingly at the type of justice that is being delivered in Alabama, we should be very, very careful. It would appear that if you are in trouble with law, it may either cost you a lot of money, or the quality of representation that you receive may not be appropriate. As a “civilised” country how we treat the poorest and most desperate is a mark of us as a nation. Other countries should be seeing England as an exemplar, not as a leader in the race to the bottom.

1 comment:

  1. I think you should not be worrying about offending readers. Offering insightful commentary on issues of justice should lead to good dialogue and ultimately good problem solving.

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