Word: lawyer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just a year before L.B.J.'s advent in Appalachia, Harry Caudill, a lawyer from the University of Kentucky who is descended from the earliest settlers of the Cumberland Plateau, wrote a small classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. The book detailed with angry eloquence the paradox of a people who had grown "shockingly poor" in a land stuffed with "valuable natural resources." In The Watches of the Night, an equally indignant, equally effective broadside, Caudill updates that gloomy report. Appalachia in the '60s, he suggests, was L.B.J.'s and America's domestic Viet Nam: a confrontation...
Every criminal defendant who faces the possibility of going to prison is entitled to a lawyer, the Supreme Court ruled in 1972. But how good must the lawyer be? Last week a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia endorsed a set of standards that lawyers must meet. It then added the startling requirement that whenever a defendant shows that his lawyer was seriously inadequate, the federal prosecutor bears the burden of proving "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the lawyer's action did no harm to his client's chances...
...conduct all "appropriate investigations." Perhaps such rules would not be necessary, said Bazelon, "if all defense attorneys had the skill and experience of a Clarence Darrow. We do not live in that kind of world, however." Bazelon then reversed the 1970 robbery conviction of Willie DeCoster Jr. because his lawyer had not interrogated some witnesses who might have backed the defendant's story...
...decision prompted a bitter dissent from Judge George MacKinnon, who pointed out that DeCoster's lawyer had not talked to the suggested witnesses because he believed DeCoster was guilty, a fact DeCoster in effect conceded during posttrial procedures. Reviewing Bazelon's liberal record, the conservative MacKinnon sounded an unusually personal note, saying that "practically all criminal convictions would be set aside" if Bazelon had his way. "What my colleague overlooks is that the public has some right to have the guilty convicted." Colleague Bazelon may also have neglected to consider fully the increasingly conservative view of the Supreme...
...would say that this is not a simple case of assault and battery," Robert Pleshaw, the defense lawyer for the four said yesterday. "There is some racism involved," he said...