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Notes -
https://abc7news.com/post/people-charged-felonies-san-francisco-could-released-due-lack-public-defenders/18054704/
There's a lot going on in this article. The San Francisco public defender's office is claiming that individuals must be released from incarceration if the office does not receive more funding to secure additional manpower. They also claim that this is due to frivolous cases being brought up by the DA, saying that their caseload has incr by 60% since 2021.
The DA claims that it is a cynical attempt to hold the city for ransom to secure more funding for the Public Defender's office.
It's interesting to me that the Public Defender's office chose 2021 as its metric, as I believe that represented the low-water mark of law enforcement activity in the US over the last decade.
Does anyone in the area have more context on this? It appears to be a very specific kind of infighting that seems very alien to me.
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).
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.
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.
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