Public defenders are important. They are critical.
I wonder if the Scottsboro young men had well-trained,
well-funded public defenders, whether the outcome may have been different.
The case like Powell
is so essential in really driving home the idea that competent,
effective counsel is a right or should be a right,
particularly to poor and marginalized folks who were generally black and brown people.
You had nine individuals,
young African-American men. I will not refer to them as boys because of
the derogatory bent to the phrase boys when you're talking about black men.
As they were traveling,
there was also another group of individuals,
poor white young men who were also on the train.
The two groups got into a fight.
The train was stopped.
Now there were two young white women who'd said that they had been
sexually assaulted by all nine of the young black men on the train.
Those young men were arrested,
and within five days of being arrested, they were indicted.
I think they were arrested March 25th, and by April 6th,
their trial had started.
In my world, as somebody who represents individuals accused of felonies,
it takes an average of two years for a case to go to
trial because there are certain things that need to be done in a case,
investigation, preparation, talking to witnesses,
none of which happened here.
They didn't have the benefit of somebody who was competent
enough to help them navigate the terrain that they found themselves in.
The jury was an all-white male jury.
The young black men,
they were divided into groups of three, and
each group of three had a trial on a particular day.
Each trial lasted a day on a rape case.
The lawyer did do one thing that I thought was phenomenal but didn't preserve the record.
He called a doctor as a witness, and the doctor testified that the women who were
accusing them were examined and showed absolutely no signs of rape.
The jury disregarded that information,
the men were convicted,
and the men were sentenced to die,
I think everyone, but the youngest, who I think was either 12 or 13 at the time.
The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed
the conviction, and then it went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said,
no, this is unconscionable.
It's the first time that the Supreme Court drew a line in
the sand saying that if you are accused of a crime in a capital offense case,
you were entitled, based on the 14th Amendment due process clause,
you are entitled to counsel and not just a warm body.
Sutherland wrote the majority opinion for the case.
The holding really carefully lays out what it means to have a fair trial.
I love it because it talks about not just honoring the letter of the law which says,
we'll just give you some lawyer, anybody.
What you have is a careful detailing of what that looks like.
It looks like having time to investigate.
It looks like having somebody who's adept,
somebody who understands the law,
and is able to navigate the accused through this just very
treacherous terrain which anybody accused finds themselves in.
Once it was remanded,
a prosecutor taking a look at that case
should have dismissed the charges.
Unfortunately, those gentlemen were tried twice more. Just really tragic story.
The jury system was pretty much
set up for them to be found guilty, no matter how many times they were tried.
What hasn't really changed, unfortunately,
is the weaponization of our law enforcement and our court system,
particularly, when it concerns black and brown people,
but particularly, towards black men.
The over-incarceration of black man is at an all-time high.
It's imperative that we fund public defender offices.
That's a plea that's personal to me because
I started my career as a public defender. For crying out loud,
we spend about $82 billion on law enforcement and
the carceral system, and maybe some of that money really needs go
into making sure that our public defender offices are well-resourced
so that they can meet the mandate that's been given
to them to represent the least of us,
those folks who otherwise can't afford to retain their own counsel.