When justice doesn't get justice

In an article on the New York Times web site, that will be in tomorrows print edition, Erik Eckholm writes about a very disturbing trend. The trend is the lack of public defenders for the growing amount of cases in the country. Mr. Eckholm writes about how in Florida's Miami-Dade county there is a lawsuit that has been filed by lawyers to cut back on there workload. A workload that has increased over the last few years from somewhere around 210,000 clients/cases to over 225,000. The article goes on to describe how Florida is not the only place hard hit by this trend. It is happening all over the nation, along with a growing case load, budgets are also being cut. In Florida a budget cut of somewhere around 12%. The article also tells antidotes of lawyers who because they had such big caseloads they missed out on providing all of there clients with proper legal service. In one case a man who would've gotten 1-year in jail, did not because his lawyer could not get to him in enough time, he ended up receiving 5-years in jail. A very interesting article, that is linked below:

New York Times