Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Confessions of a Public Defender


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Still liberal after all these years.

I am a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 per cent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites.

I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. The handful of whites I see commit all kinds of crimes. In my many years as a public defender I have represented only three Asians, and one was half black.
As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. Actual black behavior was a shock to me.

The media invariably sugarcoat black behavior. Even the news reports of the very crimes I dealt with in court were slanted. Television news intentionally leaves out unflattering facts about the accused, and sometimes omits names that are obviously black. All this rocked my liberal, tolerant beliefs, but it took me years to set aside my illusions and accept the reality of what I see every day. I have now served thousands of blacks and their families, protecting their rights and defending them in court. What follow are my observations.

2 comments:

  1. I read this article a couple of days ago. Our problem is with public defenders like this guy and its all contained in the last paragraph or so. He is a lawyer but doesn't understand "provide for the national defense and promote the general welfare". Provide and promote do not mean the same thing and general welfare has a different meaning than welfare. He obviously never read Davy Crockets letter about spending public funds and has never questioned the original meaning of words in the Constitution. Yea, you can bet how he interprets the "well regulated" meaning in the 2nd amendment. With lawyers and interpreters like this person it is not hard to see where "law" and regulations went tits up.

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