March 21, 2006

MO: M*A*S*H p.d.

I see that other people use this analogy to describe what we do; from the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Meatball surgery

Last fall, a young lawyer earning $33,700 a year as an assistant public defender in a medium-sized Missouri county took a second job to help pay off his law school loans. The job he took was delivering pizza.

One night, he tucked a hot pizza under his arm, drove to a customer's home and rang the bell. When the door opened, there stood one of the defendants he'd been assigned to represent in court.

"The guy's mother called us and was very upset," said Cathy R. Kelly, director of training and communications for the Missouri Public Defender's Training Division. "She said she wanted her son to have a real lawyer, not a pizza guy..."


See also Rights on the verge of collapse, with "grave doubts that Missouri is meeting the constitutional standard of providing effective counsel to the poor."

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