Democrat Gitmo

Why isnt the left demanding that these prisoners be released?

Metzger and other lawyers have filed lawsuits demanding that jailed suspects be tried or released.[/size]

Quote:

Metzger and other lawyers have filed lawsuits demanding that jailed suspects be tried or released.[/size]

Your answer was there if you bothered to read it MM.

In New Orleans, Justice on Trial
Katrina Strains Public Defender's Office

April 15, 2006
Washington Post

NEW ORLEANS -- Every week or so here, the chief criminal court judge and his staff discover someone in jail who shouldn't be.

For the most part, Chief District Judge Calvin Johnson said, they are indigent defendants who were arrested on misdemeanor charges just before or after Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29. They often lack attorneys and their cases get "lost" in the system, he said, leaving the accused to serve weeks or months of extra incarceration.

Around the courthouse, it's known as "doing Katrina time."

"We're still finding people -- they bubble up weekly," Johnson said, noting that he releases them. "We can't have people in jail indeterminately."

The flooding after Katrina robbed thousands of people of their homes, drinking water and other essentials. But it has also deprived many others of another fundamental: the right to legal representation.

The criminal justice system here is besieged on all sides. The evidence room was flooded with several feet of water. Witnesses, like half the population, are scattered all over the country. The district court's 13 judges are restricted to holding court in two federal courtrooms available only four days a week. No criminal jury trials have been held since the storm.

But what may be raising the most troubling constitutional issues, according to judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers, is the underfunded public defender system, which is required by law to provide indigent defendants with legal representation.

It is now at the center of a high-stakes constitutional standoff.

District Judge Arthur Hunter, a former street cop, has announced that he is suspending the prosecution of cases in which the defendants are represented by the public defender's office -- that is, he says, until Louisiana appropriates enough money to allow public defenders to put on a competent defense.

Without action from the state legislature, he indicated, he may soon have to consider releasing those defendants. (Last week, lawyers began seeking the release of more than 15 of them.) "It's beyond the question of whether these defendants have effective counsel -- it's a question of whether they have attorneys at all," Hunter said.

Even before the hurricane, Louisiana's system for indigent defendants had been considered woefully inadequate, according to a report from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. There isn't enough money for the program, according to the report, leaving public defenders in one parish to handle six times the normal full-time caseload -- while working part time.

About 80 percent of defendants in New Orleans are supposed to be represented by the public defender's office. Supported largely by traffic court fines and fees -- which evaporated after Katrina -- the office shrank from 42 lawyers to 10 afterward.

With more than a thousand clients still spread out across the state in parish prisons because of damage to the Orleans Parish jail, the chief public defender said the office has not been able to meet with all it is expected to represent.

"We don't have the time or the manpower to go out to each of those facilities to speak to each of our clients," the city's chief public defender, Tilden Greenbaum, testified in Hunter's court in February, when the judge was trying to determine whether the public defender's office could offer effective assistance to the city's indigent.

The public defender program received a short-term spurt of money, but Hunter has deemed that an insufficient fix.

Meanwhile, no one knows exactly how many defendants are serving or have served "Katrina time."

<click headline to read rest of story>

parados wrote:

Quote:

Metzger and other lawyers have filed lawsuits demanding that jailed suspects be tried or released.[/size]

Your answer was there if you bothered to read it MM.

But you,Hillary,Ted Kennedy,Al Gore,and the others screaming about Gitmo arent screaming about this.
Why not?

"Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we"??

Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores
on September 11, 2001? Were people from all over the world, mostly
Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across
the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania?

Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning
or crushing death that day, or didn't they?

And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an
overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't. I don't
care at all.

I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for
incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring
about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi
Arabia.

I'll care when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking
off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling slashed
throat.

I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and
fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in
mosques

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of
nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide
bombs.

I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First
Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of
the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an
Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been
humiliated in what amounts to a college hazing incident, rest assured
that I don't care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to
move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I
don't care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and
fed "special" food that is paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that
his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your
heart of hearts that I don't care.

And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and
other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and ---- you guessed it - - - I
don't care ! ! ! ! !

Your definition of "the left" and "screaming" seems to vary at will.