By Ann W. Parks

Panelists Jo-Ann Wallace, Esther Lardent, Jonathan Smith, Darryl Hunt, Cait Clark (L’90) and Nancy Forster discuss legal aid and public defender programs.

Forty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court held in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment requires courts to provide counsel for indigent criminal defendants, the nation’s promise of equal justice continues to be elusive — according to the experts.

Panelists at a March 25 symposium on “Gideon and Katrina: Legal Aid and Defender Programs at a Crossroads” cited woefully inadequate funding, outrageous caseloads, inadequate service and in some cases, wrongful convictions as some of the most critical problems that continue to thwart the ideal mandated by the Supreme Court in 1963. As Norman Lefstein, a panelist and professor at Indiana University School of Law pointed out, though Gideon and its progeny provide a right to counsel, those cases did not address just how jurisdictions were to provide that right — or where they would get the money.

“We can’t deny Gideon is broken,” said Cait Clarke (L’90), director of public interest law opportunities at Equal Justice Works. “I think some offices run on ether when I see what they are working with.”

Lefstein told the story of a public defender in one jurisdiction who was expected to juggle more than 300 cases alone and believed that people were going to jail as a result. But Nancy Forster, public defender for the state of Maryland, said that her state at least has “made terrific strides.” While public defenders can always use more funding, she noted, Maryland’s agency operates independently from the courts, with over 500 attorneys and its own caseload standards.

“We are very, very fortunate in the state of Maryland,” she said.

Panelist Darryl Hunt, who spent nearly 20 years in a North Carolina prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, shared his thoughts on the need for attorney experience and client trust. His own public defenders had never handled a capital case and he was serving a life sentence before he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2004. Only one vote, he said, saved him from the death penalty.

Chris Flood, deputy chief of trials of Orleans Public Defenders, commented that one good thing about Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was that it effectively erased the deplorable public defender delivery system that was in place before. Martha Bergmark, the director of the Mississippi Center for Justice, said lawyers and law students are putting in thousands of volunteer hours, new funding is flowing into legal services in Mississippi and there is a new access to justice commission in her state.

“Not since the civil rights movement has there been such an intense national spotlight cast on the deep South’s continuing problems of racial and economic injustice,” she said. “Lawyers and law students across the country just seem to get it.”         

Equal Justice Library

The day also marked the permanent arrival at Georgetown Law of the Equal Justice Library, established in 1988 to preserve and commemorate the legal profession’s history of providing legal services to the poor. The collection consists of books, papers, oral histories and other materials, including a 16th-century book believed to be the first compilation of English statutes, one creating a right to counsel in indigent civil cases. The late Robert Oakley, Georgetown Law’s longtime library director, was responsible for bringing the Equal Justice Library to the Law Center in 2006.

At the recent event, the library accepted the papers of the late Gary Bellow, a pioneering public service lawyer who founded Harvard Law School’s clinical education programs. Jeanne Charn, lecturer and former clinical director of Harvard Law School who was also Bellows’ wife, added several gifts of her own — including framed photos and a phonograph recording of a speech — to the collection.

“We would not be having this conversation if we had Gary Bellow multiplied a few thousand times,” said Georgetown Law Professor Peter Edelman, as he shared his own thoughts on poverty law advocacy and access to justice. In a brief speech, Edelman called for a change in the way the national government deals with poor people in this country.

“We need to be ready to think in terms of a new paradigm,” he said. “Perspectives have to widen; blinders need to be taken off.”

Jon C. Dubin, a professor at Rutgers-Camden School of Law, and Susan D. Carle, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, received the Edgar and Jean Cahn Article Awards. The awards are presented by the Equal Justice Library for excellence in articles exploring the topic of equal justice.

The symposium was presented by the board of directors of the consortium for the National Equal Justice Library as well as the dean, faculty and students of Georgetown Law.