Sherry Chandler » 2008 » May » 28
Public defenders’ office to begin refusing cases
The state’s chief public defender is asking judges to order the state Finance and Administration Cabinet to pay for private lawyers for poor criminal defendants because his agency can no longer afford to represent them.
In a letter to judges released Wednesday, public advocate Ernie Lewis warned that public defenders will begin refusing certain types of cases starting July 1 as a result of the $2.3 million budget cut approved this spring by the General Assembly.
Lewis said the Department of Public Advocacy cannot afford to fill about 40 vacancies. With caseloads already at unethically high levels, Lewis said, public defenders cannot take on additional cases.
“The dilemma that now exists is that the Commonwealth of Kentucky is obligated to provide counsel to poor people charged with crimes, but the legislature has failed to fund that obligation,” Lewis wrote. “DPA will assert that the solution to this is for courts to enter orders requiring the Commonwealth to pay for private counsel.”
The service cuts, and the request for the state to foot the bill for private lawyers, could lead to a constitutional showdown. And, as Lewis acknowledges in the letter, it could lead to sanctions for Lewis personally.
This post was written by sherry
Linda Blackford, writing in the Lexington Herald-Leader:
It’s hard to imagine now, says Charlie Peters, but back in 1960, the Catholicism of John F. Kennedy was every bit as big a problem for Appalachian voters as Barack Obama’s race appears to be today.
When Peters, Kennedy’s Kanawha County campaign chairman, first took him around Charleston, W.Va, at least 20 percent of the people refused to shake his hand. So Kennedy spent 16 of the 30 days before the primary showing West Virginians “he wasn’t wearing the Pope’s clothes,” Peters said.
The campaign brought in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., distributed 40,000 copies of a Reader’s Digest story about Kennedy’s heroism in World War II, and spread around plenty of money. Kennedy won the primary, which helped propel him to the nomination.
The Obama campaign chose a different route – a smattering of TV commercials and fliers about his Christian faith, but just one visit by the candidate to Kentucky and West Virginia this year. There was little direct conversation about voters’ misconceptions of his religion, or about concerns related to divisive remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
He lost to Hillary Clinton in both states by more than 30 points.
The question now is whether Obama, as the expected nominee, will continue writing off Appalachia or return and try to make his case to white, rural voters.
“I worry about them gliding past a problem like that,” said Peters, who went on to found the Washington Monthly magazine and is now an Obama supporter. “There are people like this all over the country, and if you don’t reach out, they would have stayed in West Virginia thinking Jack would have done what the Pope said, just like now they’ll think Obama will do what Rev. Wright says. It calls for dramatic action.”
Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent piece that asks the question do you fight racism or call the people racist and write them off? I know my answer to that question.
Reading this article tempts me to conclude that, as a culture, we may have learned the wrong lesson from JFK’s run for the presidency. Everybody focused on his superior television presence, so that now our candidates spend obscene millions on saturation television advertising, a shameful percentage of which is negative. Not to mention debates that are more about theater than policy.
Bad media coverage and lack of money has forced Hillary Clinton to run a campaign more like Kennedy ran in West Virginia, based on grass roots, face-to-face politics. This strategy, which the Clintons have always liked, has been more successful for her than the powers that be like to admit.
Huckabee, like him or not, did some of the same thing and was rewarded with some success with very little money. The difference being, I’d hazard, that Huckabee was never a candidate who was going to have broad appeal.
What that proves, it seems to me, is that people are ready to by-pass television. They want to see and hear the candidates direct.
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Good news: Missouri’s voter ID law failed.
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Update: Then there’s this from The Daily Yonder: Julie Ardery’s City Voters & the Unfairer Sex
Uncomfortable as it may make us all, it’s time to own up to what the primary election results are bearing out.
City people are misogynistic. It’s not clear whether urbanites fear the idea of female leadership or (like T.S. Eliot, who was from St. Louis, by the way) they just don’t like the way women smell.
Read the rest.
This post was written by sherry
A Cure for All Diseases by Reginald Hill
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This semi-epistolary novel is a re-telling of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, as a detective novel. As a gimmick, it’s pretty amusing, though I’d guess the number of people who have read Sanditon is small indeed.
Beyond that, the novel offers Hill’s usual cast of characters: Andy Dalziel, Peter Pascoe, Edgar Wield, and the nemesis Frannie Roote. They blend in well with the resort town characters “rescued” from Austen.
Hill is an intelligent writer who seems to be having fun with the English literary tradition in all his books.
It’s a good read. Maybe not the very best of the Dalziel/Pascoe novels.
Trying out this widget that lets me post my GoodReads reviews to my blog. I am not the real Hill fan on this blog and I leave it to, in fact invite, Poppysmatus to give us his take on the novel.
Meanwhile, here is also my GoodReads review of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife:
Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a clean even eloquent collection of poems that somehow didn’t move me as much as it ought to have. I am willing to admit the fault to be in myself. Sometimes wonderful books come to us at the wrong time.
The book has three sections: Divorce Epistles, Breaking Up the House, and Late Wife. The last section, mostly loosely rhymed sonnets, is haunted by the ghost of the lover’s late wife. This is the section that spoke most to me, though I read it in a noisey cafeteria.
For a long time there would be the small
resurfacing of things you had forgotten
to throw away, or ceased to see at all.
These returned her, not to you, but to me
the way I had seen a spider unknot itself…
– from “Corrective”
This post was written by sherry
