berkeleykel06 wrote:
Regardless of whether DF was aiming for sarcasm or not, the point is from what I've seen what he said isn't too far off. The Innocence Project only takes the most egregious cases, but I worked in INTAKE for the Innocence Project. So I looked through cases that wouldn't qualify for Innocence as well as ones that would. Even in the cases that would not qualify to be picked up for the Innocence Project, the briefs I read were one step above incompetence: clear copy and paste jobs, conclusory statements without even attempting to make arguments to back then up, briefs in murder cases that read like they took an hour max to write. No errors substantial enough to overturn conviction, but they clearly did not take significant amounts of reading and writing to construct.
Even working intake you were only exposed to an egregious subset of cases, so I don't think it's fair to make such a broad disparaging statement. The vast majority of PDs bust their ass for their clients and in return get low pay and disrespect even from those who are ostensibly on their side.
I'm also curious as to how many of those [I'm assuming appellate] briefs were written by PDs as opposed to private defense attorneys, because in my experience the former are much more likely to actually care about their clients while the latter sometimes are just collecting a check. Without having stats in front of me I think the majority of overturned convictions were not PD cases.
In sum, to make it clear for you what I was trying to say: thanks for your work with the Innocence Project, but before you speak on attorneys who have dedicated their lives to a largely thankless cause you should make sure you are in a position to know what you're talking about.
