(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where the boys have finally made it through the wall.
The good people at Bolts have provided an invaluable compendium of the powers of every individual state supreme court—how they are formed, what their various roles in things like state elections are, their formal relations with other institutions of a state's government, etc. Along the way, the magazine discovered how badly Louisiana's poorer defendants have it.
Louisiana passed legislation in March giving Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office in January, more command over the state’s public defense system. Starns quickly told district defenders in charge of indigent defense across the state to start bracing for cuts to their pay—a reversal of raises the state had issued for defenders with basement-level salaries just a year ago...During Starns’ first meeting with public defenders under the new law, which gives him more control over the state public defense budget, he warned of the cuts on the horizon—to the point of even encouraging district defenders to open private practices to supplement their income, as the Louisiana Illuminator first reported last month. The axe finally fell during Starns’ meeting with district defenders last week, when he announced salary cuts of up to 51 percent and a new scheme for paying district defenders.
Regulars here at the shebeen know of management's affection for public defenders. They do noble, thankless work for terrible pay because they believe all that guff about equal justice under the law. They do their best, day after day, at least to overcome Lenny Bruce's famous admonition about how, in the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls. Alas, in places like Louisiana, they live their entire careers under the budget ax—or, at least, as permanent punching bags for the people who wield it.
Starns’ plan removes prohibitions on private practice for district defenders and boosts their pay if they take on their own cases in addition to managing their regional public defense offices. The plan also ties district defender pay to fees that clients must pay their office whenever they’re convicted, which critics say provides an incentive for offices to encourage quick convictions. “When you have a system that incentivizes lawyers to lose, that’s a problem,” said Will Snowden, a Loyola University New Orleans law professor and former public defender. “How can any poor person reasonably believe that their public defender has their best interests at heart?”
Pro Tip: they're not supposed to.
We move along to North Carolina, where certifiable bag o'nuts Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has a background even more twisted and weird than his public pronouncements on gay people, Jewish people, Michelle Obama, and, most significantly for our purposes today, government assistance programs. Robinson's wife ran a nonprofit called Balanced Nutrition which ran afoul of the state authorities and has closed down. However, the now-defunct organization profited handsomely from the same government funding Robinson now rails about on the campaign trail. From the AP:
Over the past decade, Robinson’s household has relied on income from Balanced Nutrition Inc., a nonprofit founded by his wife, Yolanda Hill, that administered a free lunch program for North Carolina children. The organization, funded entirely by taxpayers, has collected roughly $7 million in government funding since 2017, while paying out at least $830,000 in salaries to Hill, Robinson and other members of their family, tax filings and state documents show.
The income offered the Robinsons a degree of stability after decades of struggle that included multiple bankruptcies, home foreclosure and misdemeanor charges — later dropped — for writing bad checks. In Robinson’s telling, the financial turnaround provided by the organization also allowed for his ascent into the North Carolina government.
“Yolanda’s nonprofit was providing a salary for her that was enough to support us,” Robinson wrote in his 2022 memoir, noting its growth gave him the freedom to quit his furniture manufacturing job in 2018 and begin a career in populist conservative politics.
I leave it to the more tasteless among us to remark upon the phrase, "free lunch program," in this political context.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Cowboy Jokester Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of someone who broke the cardinal rule of our modern surveillance society—the microphone is always live and nothing on the Internet truly dies. From NonDoc:
The complex scenario includes allegations that former OSBI general counsel Richard Smothermon violated Oklahoma’s Rules of Professional Conduct late last year by simultaneously working for the state agency and the OSBI Agents Association during negotiations over whether to terminate since-resigned agent Joe Kimmons, who used the phrase “my n—a” in what he thought was a private phone conversation with a friend and coworker.
It seems things at the office were a very chewy cluster of fck.
As Spurlock sought to remove Kimmons from the agency in November and December, she was also supporting the hiring of former Pushmataha County Judge Jana Wallace as OSBI’s new general counsel. But Wallace resigned May 2 for her own crass diction hours after asking whether NonDoc had obtained an April 2022 email in which she had written the racial slur “wet back” while asking a question of a Department of Public Safety attorney.Combined with litigation over an OSBI agent’s turnpike wreck that left an auto mechanic hospitalized and a resigned OSBI sex crimes investigator’s prosecution for sexual abuse of a minor, the resignation of Wallace and the final report from Drummond’s office regarding Spurlock underscore the array of internal issues facing the agency, which is also seeking legislative appropriations to replace its headquarters, a portion of which has been decommissioned owing to a mold problem some fear could spur a class-action lawsuit.
All that, and mold, too. Life is truly a minefield.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
