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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25490 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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There is a recent precedent for this kind of thing: Appellate court affirms ruling, releasing defendants from Oregon jails who aren't promptly assigned a public defender

I have zero idea what staffing in the SF PDO is like, but a lack of defense attorneys is a problem in many places (despite all the leftist/woke people attending law schools, the percentage of graduates willing to do defense work seems to be dropping).

Some previous discussion on the Oregon situation.

I don't think it's paradoxical - the more woke someone is the less they follow the old norms of "give everyone a fair chance and make sure the system doesn't abuse its power over people" and are more likely to be unwilling to defend really bad people. Sure, most of the work a defense attorney might face will involve protecting the rights of someone who's just a victim of circumstances, like Decarlos Brown. But sometimes you might be called to defend someone who you cannot in good conscience, like someone homophobic or racist. It's better to be able to pick clients and then take on a few pro bono cases to feel better about it.

I worry that we will start to see the same shift in Medicine.

Sure, most of the work a defense attorney might face will involve protecting the rights of someone who's just a victim of circumstances, like Decarlos Brown.

Are we talking about the same person? Or does my sarcasm detector need new batteries? From WP:

Surveillance footage shows Zarutska sitting in front of Brown, who was already seated on the train. Four minutes after Zarutska boarded, Brown pulled a pocketknife from his hoodie and stabbed Zarutska three times from behind, including at least once in the neck.

Is the woke left actually arguing that he is innocent?

My take from ymeskhout is that most clients of public defenders are guilty as sin, but the job of their counsel is to make sure that they get their due process (and pragmatically, negotiate a plea deal). And to be sure, I agree that that they are a key component of the legal system.

Basically, I think that any defense attorney who lives under the assumption that all of her clients are innocent and that any of them getting convicted is a miscarriage of justice will have a very miserable life.

07mk gave the response I would have but also I didn't mean "innocent" when I said "victim of circumstances." Brown is clearly not in the drivers seat of his life, even if he's (allegedly) guilty as sin of cold blooded murder.

Brown is clearly not in the drivers seat of his life

Just so that there is no misunderstanding, do you believe that Brown not being "in the drivers seat of his life" should absolve him of responsibility?

Absolutely not.

Ok, but then what should be done? Who should be held responsible for the killing of Iryna Zarutska?

What does it mean for Decarlos Brown to be a "victim of circumstance"?

Would you support charging whoever it was who decided to release Brown after the 14th time he'd been arrested with reckless endangerment and negligent homicide?

I said, "Absolutely not," in response to the question of "Should [this] absolve him of responsibility?" It absolutely does not absolve him of responsibility.

However, it does seem like there were a lot of failures from other people that lead to this happening to Brown. The insane asylums closed down before he was even born. He was allowed to walk free from jail many times when it was clear that something like this was inevitable. He was born with mental illness, which can't be his fault, strictly speaking.

I would definitely support some kind of law that held people accountable for going under sentencing guidelines if there is a reoffence. Don't know if it would be jail time, but victims should certainly be able to sue judges for this.

I think I am realizing that "Victim of Circumstance" doesn't mean what I thought it did. I saw it used in all kinds of situations where the "victim" was obviously vicious and committing severe moral faults, so I assumed the definition required that. But it seems that people think "victim" must mean "innocent."

But it seems that people think "victim" must mean "innocent."

When you say that someone is a "victim" of something you are saying that their situation is not one of choice but rather something that has been inflicted or forced upon them. This is why there is a taboo against victim blaming.

Decarlos Brown can not be both "a victim" by the common understanding of the word, and responsible. This begs the question; If Brown is not responsible, who is?

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I would put it like this:

  1. If somebody is a victim, they must have victimised by someone or something.
  2. It would be odd to put more blame on the victim than the person or thing who made them a victim, and without whom this presumably wouldn’t have happened.
  3. And then it’s a hop, a skip and a jump for a motivated reasoner to go from ‘ultimately, a lot of blame must also go to X’ to ‘well, it’s not really his fault’.

I'm going with a sarcastic example of a real scenario.

Is the woke left actually arguing that he is innocent?

Immediately after the murder blew up on social media (which IIRC was a few weeks after it happened), there was some quote going around said by some Dem politician or commentator, IIRC, that, by looking at his actions in this murder, Brown was clearly hurting and that we have a responsibility to understand the circumstances that led the man to such a state. Most likely I got some details wrong in the summary in my previous sentence.

As expected, this was spread around widely in right-wing media, while it was ignored by the left. As best as I can tell, this framing of Brown as a victim of circumstance was never popular or common among the woke left. However, because of how epistemics work according to the woke left ideology, it also meant that no one on the woke left had grounds to challenge this notion that Brown was a victim of circumstance without also getting punished by/expelled from the woke left.

It's better to be able to pick clients and then take on a few pro bono cases to feel better about it.

They don't even do this. They want to go to work for NGOs and be "activists" and "raise awareness" and attend zoom meetings talking about white supremacy. Writing motions and appearing in court and doing jail visits and arguing with prosecutors and dealing with hostile judges? That's, like, hard work.

I can't speak to young attorneys not wanting to do real work, but I've definitely sensed a "grass is greener" mentality among several of them. It's usually that they're convinced that a particular line of work is boring and that there's something interesting and more glamorous out there. I've never done criminal defense, but I interviewed with the DA's office a number of years back and was told that the job was in the DUI division; I'd be doing nothing but drug DUIs, all day every day, and if I needed help I could ask the regular DUI guy for advice.

I think part of the problem stems from the fact that in law school you're constantly moving between different areas of the law, but when you get into practice you're mostly doing the same thing, and novel legal issues don't come up so much as novel factual issues. It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw, but I spent last week going over hundreds of pages of contracting records from the 70s.

It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw

This is one of my "complaining about the kids these days" hobbyhorses: in criminal defense, there is a reason to be searching caselaw almost every day. Huge amounts of constitutional disputes revolve around tiny factual differences and finding caselaw with the most similar factual similarities and arguing by analogy why those should control instead of the cases favoring the State is the name of the game.

Being able to say to a prosecutor "here are 3 opinions with similar fact patterns and here's why I'm going to win a suppression hearing" is the best move towards a better plea offer (even if the argument is mostly bluster). Maybe the research leads to 0 and it's time for hard talk with the client that they have zero legal issues to stand on. Either way, that exact issue shouldn't need to be researched from scratch in the future and it should be incorporated as base-level knowledge for future cases.

There are plenty of areas of law where changes are slow and caselaw searches aren't crucial, like you say yours is. Criminal defense is not one, especially in more populous states where new decisions on criminal issues are a constant thing. And I cannot get newer attorneys to do caselaw searches. No matter how many times I hear, "I have a case with fact pattern Z, what do you think?" and respond with "I don't know, what caselaw have you found with something similar?," I keep getting blank stares like research never occurs to them. And research could not be easier now compared to the paper days of Shepard cites, or even the early 2000s electronic options.

This is not isolated to my office. I hear the same thing from other defense friends who have become supervisors or mentors. Plus it's merely one facet of the unwillingness to do work overall. Coupled with the overall dearth of candidates (something DA offices are contending with, too), it makes for frustrating times.

Is it really that you can't get them to do caselaw searches or that they just aren't experienced enough to know that they need to do them? I actually had to assign a newer kid some research into a motion in limine I was preparing a few weeks ago. He called me five minutes later with the disappointing news that I was wasting my time drafting it because he only got as far as the rules before seeing that it wasn't going to work, but he never complained about it or anything. But if they are pushing back on it it reminds me of a scene from The Wire where Herc calls the procedures "more bullshit" and Freamon says "This right here IS the job. When you came down here what did you expect?" Maybe it's because when I switched practice areas I harbored no delusions about what the job would entail, even though I didn't know what the job would entail. There's always an outside impression that's at least somewhat at odds with the workaday reality of any job. I'd honestly rather have younger attorneys who at least ask you what they should do. I've found it preferable to the ones who don't ask you anything and then turn in terrible work product, and then stay bad at their jobs long enough that they can't even ask some questions without eliciting "how long have you been working here?" as a response.

Less of this, please.

Scare quotes and straw men do not make for a compelling argument.

Noted. I will be more detailed next time and also make it clear that such comments are drawing on my getting-way-too-close-to-20-years of defense practice, sitting through mandatory Continuing Legal Education courses stuffed to the seams with lefty identitarian terminology, and watching new law grads wash out of PD work.

Despite the sarcasm, as someone who agreed with your initial post, that bit of background adds a ton of weight to it and makes your point a lot more meaningful.

I was not actually being sarcastic, although I can see how it might appear so. I took note of his mod statement and tried to make a plain statement of information I'll include in the future to provide context and not run afoul of a red tag again.

You can see the effect in volunteer work as well - if it's not flashy and exciting, nobody wants to do it anymore. I'm even more cynical about it tbh - by moving morality into the sphere of what (not) to say, it allows people to feel superior without actually having to do anything.

Public defense does not pay very well and SF cost of living is sky high, so it's nearly impossible to live in SF on a public defender's salary. Even if people want to do public defense in SF, it's difficult to sustain financially.

SF PDO jobs start at $150k and go as high as $270k. Perhaps even at 150k, it's tough to get by in SF. But they definitely aren't paying Deep South "might as well be working fast food" public defense salaries.

Maybe I'm reading it a bit wrong, bit it seems like there's a qualitative difference here.

The 9th circuit decision seems to suggest that not having access to an attorney after seven days is grounds for release. This San Francisco scenario outlined above suggests that a defense attorney who doesn't feel like they can make time for the client is grounds for release.

Am I making a distinction without a difference, or is this a different kind of argument?

Am I making a distinction without a difference, or is this a different kind of argument?

A little of both. Some states (not sure about CA) have case limits for attorneys because it's recognized that a high enough caseload, at some point, is roughly the same as no attorney. The Ninth Circuit opinion involves literally no attorney, but the analogy is there to be made for attorneys with a high caseload who can't devote appropriate amounts of time/effort to each case.

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