Awesome Move

Facing a significant shortage of attorneys, a slashed budget, and a public criminal defense system that ranks 49th in the nation, the head of the Missouri State Public Defender’s office [Michael Barrett] took a dramatic step this week.

On Tuesday, he used a rarely invoked state statute and sent a letter to Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon that appointed Nixon — as a practicing attorney in the state — to serve as the lawyer for a criminal defendant who cannot afford an attorney.

[...]

“The government funds a lot of things. We’re one of the few things that you have to fund,” Barrett told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview on Wednesday night. “You’ve got to pay so that people can get their constitutional rights. Before someone gets incarcerated after being prosecuted by the state, they deserve a lawyer. And that’s the state’s obligation.”

[...]

In the Tuesday letter, Barrett pointed to a series of actions taken by Nixon and the legislature limiting and reducing the funding for the public defender’s office in the face of other information showing that it is dramatically underfunded.

The actions, by Barrett’s telling, began with Nixon’s veto of a bill seven years ago that was aimed at providing relief to the overburdened office and ended with Nixon using state budgetary authority to withhold significant amounts of money — nearly $3.5 million in 2015 — from the Public Defender’s office budget. That final action led the Public Defender’s office and Commission to sue Nixon in July.

  Buzzfeed

Underfunding public defenders is a fine way to further disenfranchise the poor and mostly, the black.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.