State of Injustice: How New York State Turns its Back on the Right to Counsel for the Poor

The right to an attorney is guaranteed under the United States Constitution. In 1963, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that everyone accused of a crime is entitled to a competent lawyer even if he or she cannot afford one.

But more than 50 years later, poor and often innocent New Yorkers are forced through the criminal justice system and sent to jail undefended and alone.

State of Injustice: How New York State Turns its Back on the Right to Counsel for the Poor focuses on five counties: Onondaga (Syracuse), Suffolk, Ontario, Schuyler and Washington. In each of these counties, people too poor to afford private attorneys too often appear before judges without a lawyer by their side, or are forced to navigate the criminal justice system with a revolving cast of overworked attorneys unfamiliar with their cases. Public defense attorneys who strive to protect the rights of their clients are too often thwarted by caseloads up to five times the recommended maximums and a lack of resources for investigations, experts and even workplace basics like computers.

More from the NYCLU.

User-Generated Emotions

I received an e-mail from something called ICG Weekly Perspective. The writer, Joan, is a big fans of rating systems. She believes "they add useful and easily digestible value to otherwise pedestrian data content, and help effectively deal with the 'option overload,' so well described in the book The Paradox of Choice." She then reviews a couple sites that are heavily dependent on ratings.

The first site, TheFunded.com lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Quoting Joan: "Let's just say the process of asking people for millions of dollars to fund your dream and in most cases being rejected is a process that creates strong emotions. Various blogs written by and for venture capitalists quickly took strong exception to the site, claiming it was a pointless service: those who got funding tended to love those who funded them; those who were turned down were invariably filled with vitriol." You can only join this if you're an entrepreneur, and they have some sort of vetting process.

The other site is a new legal directory site Avvo. It rates "lawyers through a computerized assessment of 'various factors' that the company does not reveal, coupled with the ability of consumers to post comments." One can select a specific lawyer, or sort by geography
and/or specialty. Again, a bad outcome, even losses in unwinable cases, might well skew the results. I joined for free, which will allow me to post.

Joan: "The bottom line on ratings and user commentary is that to be valuable they need to be rational, and we need to tread cautiously in areas where emotions run high."