The Public Defender Crisis

New Orleans’ top public defender Derwyn Bunton on how the right to counsel has become theoretical at best for the 4 in 5 defendants who can’t afford an attorney— PLUS: Chad Bolt returns for an epic #SOTU fact-check on the state of the Trump economy. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter…. Anyone who’s seen an episode of Law and Order knows the right to counsel in criminal cases has long been enshrined in the Constitution. But what good is a “right” to counsel if the public defender provided to you is juggling 194 other cases? Few aspects of America’s broken criminal justice system get less attention than the public defender crisis. Years of underfunding have blown a huge hole in the constitutional right to counsel, literally setting up a two-tiered system of justice based on income, as a recent, in-depth New York Times article highlighted — lifting up a harrowing study by the American Bar Association that zoomed in on Louisiana, which in many ways is ground zero of this crisis. So Rebecca talks with Derwyn Bunton, who heads up the Orleans Public Defenders Office in Louisiana.

But first: Indivisible’s Chad Bolt returns for a massive #SOTU fact-check on the state of the Trump economy, plus a roundup of the week’s biggest stories in poverty and inequality.

This week’s guests:

• Derwyn Bunton, Orleans Chief District Defender
• Chad Bolt, associate policy director at Indivisible

For more on this week’s SOTU debrief:

• Rebecca drops some Facts of the Trump Economy TM in response to Trump’s claim that “an economic miracle is taking place in the United States” (which is totally true! if you have three yachts…)
• Trump invited a Mississippi sawmill worker to SOTU, claiming his job had been saved by the tax law. (Here’s what actually happened.)
• This shouldn’t need to be said but Trump’s lies demand a massive fact-check here: immigrants don’t deplete the safety net, they FUND it.
• But guess who IS depleting the safety net? (Yeah, you guessed it.) Trump! His latest? A proposed rule that would take food assistance away from 755,000 Americans. // TAKE ACTION: Go to handsoffsnap.org to submit a public comment (deadline: April 2) and join the conversation using #HandsOffSNAP.

Other stuff to watch:

• Check out more about the corporate stock buyback legislation being pushed by Senate Dems, to require wealthy corporations to put workers — instead of rich shareholders — first.
• As Dems hold their first hearing on raising the poverty-level federal minimum wage to $15… new analysis (by genius friend-of-the-show Rachel West) finds that minimum wage workers have lost nearly a year’s salary to inflation — $13,329 — since Congress last raised the wage in 2009.
• Also on the minimum wage front… kudos to New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy just signed a $15 minimum wage into law earlier this week! 1 million New Jerseyans are set to get a raise.
• Much as it pains us to even say this out loud… next week will tell us if the government is headed back into shutdown. Check out Indivisible’s guide on what you can do to prevent a redux.

What we’re reading this week:

• Poverty Forces People to Surrender Their Pets. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way by Linda Lombardi, for TalkPoverty.org.

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. As a New York Times article last weekend brought back to the fore, years of underfunding have rendered the constitutional right to counsel theoretical at best. Literally setting up a two tiered system of justice based on income, which every year leads huge numbers of people to be locked up for the crime of being too poor to afford a lawyer who isn’t juggling hundreds of other cases. I talk with Derwyn Bunton who heads up the New Orleans Public Defender’s office in Louisiana.

But first is that Rick Perry who’s just hanging out outside the — oh no, it’s Chad Bolt! [LAUGHTER] Hey Chad, sorry, I confused you with the designated survivor but it’s actually, it’s you and I have to say I’m really glad it’s you and not Rick Perry.

CHAD BOLT: This is a thoroughly insulting start to this edition of Off Kilter

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Yeah you look, just to be clear for anyone who doesn’t know what you look like, you look nothing like Rick Perry. I just really wanted to start there.

BOLT: Appreciate that, an extremely important clarification.

VALLAS: It was an important clarification, you’re correct. But I really wanted to start there because I feel like before we get into anything serious about the State of the Union, which of course just happened this week and everyone is talking about in varying ways, can we just start with the fact that Rick Perry was selected as the designated survivor and what that says about where humanity would be if that happened?

BOLT: What a mess. This guy was on Dancing with the Stars two seasons ago.

VALLAS: Wait, I don’t think I knew that.

BOLT: Oh, have you not seen the gifs?

VALLAS: I feel like there are segments of pop culture that I am privy to Chad —

BOLT: Oh.

VALLAS: And clearly they are completely separate from the segments of pop culture you are privy to.

BOLT: Excuse me, wait a minute, is this an example where I know something about something pop culture related that Rebecca does not?

VALLAS: Yeah.

WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): Yeah but you lose points for your pronunciation of gif.

VALLAS: Oo Will, good point, good point.

BOLT: Alright, alright.

VALLAS: In my corner —

BOLT: Jury is way out on that.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: As a rule I actually don’t watch reality television.

BOLT: Oh me neither, I don’t actually watch Dancing with the Stars, I just know he was on it.

VALLAS: Oh well, OK, but I thought you were trying to go hard on the see I watch TV thing, no?

BOLT: Not with Dancing with the Stars, only with Drag Race.

VALLAS: To be clear and I feel like I need to fact check myself here, I don’t watch reality TV with one exception.

BOLT: And it is RuPaul’s Drag Race.

VALLAS: Well it’s not, it should be, it should be and you’ve been telling me to watch this for a long time and the number of time’s that I’ve been somewhere with you and you’ve looked at me and been like “Sashay away” and I’m like alright, I get it, I get it. The one show and Mary Barry if you’re listening I’d really like to hang out with you, the only show I do watch is the Great British baking show.

BOLT: Oh I’ve heard that one’s good, I haven’t watched it.

VALLAS: It is really good.

BOLT: Surprise to no one.

VALLAS: It’s a lovely antidote to everything that we live these days. Everyone’s really nice to each other even though they’re in really cut through competition because they’re these really sweet British people.

BOLT: I’ve heard everyone’s so nice.

VALLAS: They’re really nice and Mary Barry is just this fabulous judge who actually looks a lot like my grandmother. Anyway, I digress. So let’s get back to State of the Union Chad, which just happened and wow there are a lot of places we could take this. What were your initial reactions watching it assuming that you actually did put yourself through the painful process of watching it.

BOLT: I did, I did. Actually what really stood out to me was not Trump but it was actually who was in the audience. I think in many ways Trump wasn’t the story at the State of the Union, it was the 116th Congress. It’s got more women, more people of color than ever and so it’s about those powerful new voices that are populating the committees that we’ve talked about on this show before that will hold the Trump administration accountable. Like for example, boom, the House Financial Services Committee.

VALLAS: Which is what it’s called now.

BOLT: Exactly, and that’s despite his threats, by the way because I think he did make one notable digression off of the State of the Union talk and that was to issue a pretty implicit threat of, we won’t legislate, there can’t be legislation if Congress is —

VALLAS: investigating him.

BOLT: If there are investigations, which of course that’s not true. Congress absolutely should legislate and investigate at the same time.

VALLAS: I also feel like, when I was watching that line I felt like Donald Rumsfeld had written it because it had this weird rhyming thing to it.

BOLT: It’s a weird — yeah.

VALLAS: We can’t have peace and legislation if we have war and investigations and then he liked backed up and was really proud of himself that he’d gotten it right from the teleprompter.

BOLT: Yeah, it’s like hey everyone I just said a new catchphrase and no one got it.

VALLAS: Also it was one of the most ahistorical lines within the entire piece given that that is of course exactly the set of circumstances that led to our dear departed President Nixon’s departure from the White House.

BOLT: Seriously.

VALLAS: On a helicopter that was one of the same helicopters that was being used in the Vietnam War.

BOLT: And I can tell you that every single sitting member of the House, Republican or Democrat, knows that there are going to be investigations. This is not a question and it’s not something that Trump can threaten his way out of.

VALLAS: But you know what, I feel like let’s let everyone else have that conversation because this is Off Kilter and we want to talk about the economy.

BOLT: Absolutely.

VALLAS: And I want to talk about that. I want to say one more thing though because you were talking about who was there and how amazing it was to be able to, when you have the camera looking out at the members of congress watching the speech and you’re watching them stand and sit and stand and decide when to stand and all of that. There was this amazing moment where I think he might not have actually understood what had been written for him in this particular line because he actually congratulated there being more women in Congress than ever before and gave them a round of applause and they were all like yeah we’re pretty excited and we’re standing but I don’t know, I’m not sure if it just didn’t compute what he was saying.

BOLT: It didn’t seem like he got it and I think maybe he still doesn’t get it.

VALLAS: I will say that is one thing you got to give to him. If there’s a silver lining of Trump in the White House it is definitely more women than ever in Congress as part of the resistance.

BOLT: Exactly right.

VALLAS: I feel like the thing that probably is incumbent on us if we’re going to break the State of the Union at all is I’d really love to cut through all of the propaganda and not lift it up any further because plenty of other pods and TV shows and mainstream media outlets are breaking it down and talking about the rise of an authoritarian regime and that was very much what was on display as we watched this president literally as he is trying to hold the government hostage again and again over building a border wall, saying things like I’m here to unite us not to divide us so pretty clear that this was outright propaganda that we were listening to last night in really, really terrifying ways. I’d love to set that aside in large part so that we can do a little bit of a fact check point by point on some of the biggest lies he told on the state of the “Trump economy.”

BOLT: Let’s do it.

VALLAS: You down, Chad?

BOLT: I’m down.

VALLAS: Let’s do it. I would love to start with, this is the overarching lie and then we’ll get into some specific lies, quote, “an economic miracle is taking place in the United States.” That was the wording that he chose. And there are a lot of people in this country who might feel that that’s absolutely true because they are now able to buy their third yacht and that is definitely an economic miracle if you are wealthy enough to have a first or a second yacht. But Chad, what do we actually know about what’s going on in the Trump economy if you’re not that person with the third yacht?

BOLT: Well right if you ignore what’s just below the headlines, which suggest that the economy is humming along and in some ways it is but the key question is for whom. For example, Trump talked about the tax law and he credits this economic miracle in large part to the tax law that personally benefits him and we would understand that better —

VALLAS: If we saw his tax returns.

BOLT: If we saw his tax returns, honey. But so he talked about the tax law, but we know that 83% of the benefits of that tax law go to the top 1 percent. We know a recent survey of businesses revealed that the tax law actually didn’t change their hiring or investment decisions around creating new jobs or giving workers a raise. A new report out of Bloomberg this week showed that the tax law cut $21 billion from the tax bill of big banks and then after getting a $21 billion tax cut those banks laid off staff and they slowed their lending rates.

VALLAS: That doesn’t quite sound like it’s trickling down, Chad.

BOLT: Yeah, it’s not exactly working for the workers at those banks but what did they do? They poured wealth back to their shareholders through stock buy backs and we’re going to talk about that a little more in a second. He also talked about wages and we should note —

VALLAS: What did he say about wages? He said something like they’re rising at the fastest pace in decades, especially for blue collar workers who I pledge to fight for. He was making it sound like he kept his promise to fight for the forgotten man and forgotten woman. What’s really happening on wages?

BOLT: Well look at the, there’s an infinitesimal uptick in wage growth but compare that to the insane growth in corporate profits that again, are not being shared back with workers in the form of raises or other benefits. The corporate profits are being shared back with shareholders and so just to compare the two, there’s almost no comparison. Corporates are doing super, super well and workers are still at the same level where they’ve been. There is news on wage growth and that’s that on January 1st a minimum wage increase went into effect in 19 states.

VALLAS: And so to the extent that we’re seeing wages tick up, particularly for very low wage workers, it’s because of those kind of state raises that we’re actually seeing happen. But Chad I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t do the thing that one must do when one is talking about wages versus corporate profits and that’s to become a human chart.

BOLT: Yes! Do it.

VALLAS: So here’s the chart and remember, you actually, we were together I think when I did this at Netroots last year for an audience.

BOLT: I was fortunate enough to have you on a panel about the tax law and so we’re just going to go ahead and recreate it.

VALLAS: We’re going to recreate that because that’s what you need to do in this situation. So you’ve got this chart where we’ve got the X axis and the Y axis and you got wages, and it’s basically a flat line and then you’ve got corporate profits and it’s like woop! All the way up, so here I am with my body making this chart with one arm being super flat and the other arm being like whoa, I’m totally going through the ceiling! That is the corporate profits versus wages set of facts that if Trump were actually telling the truth on the economy and who is winning out would tell us that it’s wealthy corporations who are making out like gang busters and not actually the workers who aren’t seeing any of those benefits. So I want to also while we’re on this, I want to share a few other key facts Chad because I think you put it so well when you said that the headline statistics when it comes to how experts often talk about the economy are the ones that sound really rosy and so it can sound like oh wow, we’ve got this low unemployment rate, or oh hey, listen to these jobs numbers. And that’s what you hear Trump talk about when he’s crowing about this quote, unquote “best economy ever”. But I’m going to delve just a little bit below the surface to some of the numbers that I know Off Kilter listeners are very familiar with but which start to tell a fuller picture of who’s not being helped by this economy when you ask exactly the right question for whom.

So fact number one, nearly half of the country, 140 million Americans are living below the official federal poverty line or they’re right on the brink of it, just let that sink in for a second, is that the best economy ever? I would say no. fact number two, a very similar figure, 43% of U.S. households are struggling to afford food and housing and healthcare and other literally necessities for human survival. Again, is that the best economy ever? I’ll throw a couple more facts out here that people have heard but help tell this picture more fully. Four in ten American adults don’t have even $400 in the bank and we talked a lot last week about how this was really on full display in the shutdown because that puts people just one missed paycheck, let alone two, away from poverty. And I’ll throw one more out there because it’s also relevant to some of what he brought up in the course of one of his other lies and that’s that 40 million Americans, that’s 1 in 8 people in this country are currently struggling with hunger. Now clearly Trump is a little confused on how grocery stores work, thinks that not only do you need ID to purchase groceries but also that they apparently give out free food to people when they can’t afford it.

BOLT: Do they not do grocery lines of credit?

VALLAS: Apparently not in the real world, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers found out when they lined up at food banks to try to keep food on the table. But those are some of the key facts to really keep in your mind when you hear Trump say an economic miracle is taking place in the United States. The rest of that sentence is for people who own multiple yachts.

BOLT: Yeah and I would suggest that these are the measures by which we should measure the success of the economy. It’s not GDP, it’s now the DOW, it’s these real world measures of how many families can’t afford food? How many families can’t afford a $400 unexpected expense? That’s the kind of thing that we should really be working towards in congress and should really be measuring ourselves against.

VALLAS: It was also a lot of what we heard from the person I wish I were about to introduce as the Georgia governor and that’s Stacey Abrams who of course delivered the official State of the Union response. That was through and through what she was talking about was the economic struggles of a huge swath of people in this country in ways that really did reflect the world we’re actually living in as opposed to the propaganda machine we heard come out of Trump’s teleprompter last night. So Chad there’s one other piece that I really want to pull out here that Trump said, which was one of the more egregious lies because it was so straight out of his divide and conquer playbook and that was that he claimed that immigrants are quote, “depleting the safety net” and those bad immigrants, that’s why our working class members of our society are now currently struggling to make ends meet. Help us unpack that one because boy is there a lot.

BOLT: Yeah I’m glad you mentioned it because it was so ugly and also so wrong. He said quote, “undocumented immigrants deplete the social safety net” and that’s actually not right and we know this from the latest report from the Social Security trustees and others that undocumented workers pay taxes, they help fund the programs people rely on. They don’t deplete them, they help fund them and we know that immigrants undocumented and immigrants with legal status, they paid billions of dollars into Social Security each year. And what does that do? That extends the course of Social Security’s solvency and particularly because immigrants are on average younger that means that they are paying into a system that they are not yet taking benefits back from. And so particularly when we’re talking about undocumented immigrants they are not eligible for Social Security so perhaps this is the cruelest part of Trump’s ugly generalization is actually that in a way undocumented immigrants are subsidizing Social Security because they pay into it through their payroll taxes that they pay when they work but they are ineligible for the benefits themselves.

VALLAS: And the same is true for a whole range of other programs, unauthorized immigrants are generally not eligible for almost anything that would be there to support people in their time of need and I want to give a shout-out to your tweet on this. We were both tweeting fact checks during the speech and I think the way you put it was they aren’t depleting the safety net, they’re funding it and that’s absolutely right. In a lot of ways unauthorized immigrants are the makers here without being able to be the takers if you want to use the Paul Ryan frame.

BOLT: Yep and I should note quickly that the tweet you mentioned was actually a quote tweet of Indivisible board chair Marielena at the National Immigration Law Center, friend of Indivisible. She actually tweeted a really good Vox explainer on this that really breaks out exactly the contribution that immigrants, both with legal status and undocumented immigrants make to the economy generally.

VALLAS: Now it was fascinating to hear Trump blame immigrants for depleting the safety net when of course he is the deplete in chief when it comes to depleting the safety net.

BOLT: Seriously.

VALLAS: Literally Trump is spending every waking minute that he’s not I guess watching Fox News or tweeting which is what we just found out is almost all he does in his quote, unquote “executive time”, trying to figure out how to take away food and housing and healthcare from people who are struggling to make ends meet without having to get buy in from congress. We saw him do that with Medicaid, he’s continuing to try to do that with Medicaid and that’s a live fight, which I think we’re probably due for doing some updates on this show about.

But I want to spend just a second flagging something for our listeners because it is incredibly timely right now and is totally on this subject and that is the Trump administration’s proposed rule making that would take food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, some people call it SNAP away from 755,000 Americans. And specifically it would target people who are struggling who are struggling to find steady work, people who are jobless, people who maybe are cobbling together multiple jobs that have flocculating hours, people who are underemployed, can’t get enough hours from their boss, these are the people who are going to be targeted if this rule takes effect. We knew it was coming, we’ve actually referenced it a couple of times on this show as something to be watching for, particularly in the wake of the bipartisan farm bill deal that did not cut SNAP because Republicans in the Senate agreed let’s not take food away from people on a bipartisan basis. That was something people thought across party lines they could agree on.

But Trump has turned around just like he did on healthcare and said you know what, I’m going to try and do this myself, take it into his tiny little hands and do it by fiat. And so listeners, this is your moment now that you’ve been waiting for to raise your voice and engage in this fight, HandsOffSNAP.org is live, it is accepting comments and that’s what we’re going to be using to channel as many thousands and thousands of comments as we can into this public comment process between now and April 2nd to help tell the Trump administration how wide spread the outrage is but also this is a big part of the strategy in trying to defeat this kind of a proposed rulemaking because of how important it is to the litigation strategy and other components that we’ll get into at other points on this show. So HandsOffSNAP.org has everything you need and feel free to go out there and raise your voice on Twitter as well #HandsOffSNAP is where a lot of that conversation is happening. And Chad that was my shameless plug of the week.

BOLT: There we go. You do it so well.

VALLAS: Learned it from you.

BOLT: To take one more peak under the economic headlines on this point and Trump talked about it in the State of the Union how low unemployment is, well the fullest capture of unemployment that captures not only people who are not working at all but also people who are working fewer hours than they want to work is actually twice the widely reported unemployment rate. It’s actually over 8% and this SNAP rule that you just talked about allowed states to take away SNAP from workers who can’t get enough hours at their job. Those are the people again, flying below the headlines but those are the people who are really impacted.

VALLAS: So I want to move on from the State of the Union, and there’s other stuff to talk about but I want to point people to something that we’re going to have on our nerdy syllabus page, which is well worth the read. People may remember back in the day Paul Ryan was trying to find people who’s lived experiences helped to support his quest to dismantle the safety net and in the course of that he got caught telling a story that turned out not to be anywhere close to true. It was the brown paper bag story as it became to be known.

BOLT: Ah, I thought we were going in a keg stander direction here, sorry, yes.

VALLAS: Oh well, keg stand is also worth telling because that tells us how long Paul Ryan has been trying to dismantle Medicaid and everything else, it goes back to his kegger days of course but the paper bag story was that he was telling this story over and over again about how a kid felt really sad in his heart because he didn’t have a lunch like the other kids at school, he had a free lunch that was provided by the school and all he wanted was just a lunch from his mom that came in a brown paper bag. And it turned out that that story didn’t have any basis in reality oops. Well Trump had his own brown paper bag story last night because he invited a Mississippi saw mill worker to the State of the Union to be one of the people who was in the box and the reason to have him there was to say look at this guy, he had his job saved by my tax cuts and that’s why it’s a working families’ tax plan, which is actually what he had the gall to say. Well turns out when our friend Jim Tankersley over at The New York Times took a look under the hood of this one, nope. The plant’s owner got a tax break for shutting the saw mill down and reopening it two months later with drum roll please, 33 fewer workers. And then Jim Tankersley, the reporter who broke this story asked the White House, uh do you guys have any information substantiating this claim that the tax incentives in this law actually saved the saw mill, he got crickets back. so nice little piece to read by just a reminder that even the White House can’t find people in this country who have been helped by this tax law.

BOLT: So just to be clear Rebecca, what you’re saying is that Trump bragged about the benefits of his tax law saving, one of them being the saving of this sawmill and what actually happened in response to the tax law was that it’s owner closed the sawmill.

VALLAS: Yep, that is correct. Yeah, he reopened it which is great but with a lot fewer workers so oops! A little oops moment there. So we’ve only got a few minutes left Chad, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on. So I want to leave it there and take us to Congress for a second. You mentioned before you were talking a lot about stock buy-backs. We’ve actually goes some really interesting ideas coming out of the Democrats in the Senate around how we can actually stop this problem.

BOLT: Yeah, I like this idea a lot. There’s new legislation in the Senate and it’s got the backing of Democratic leadership and perhaps maybe we should first back up and say what a stock buy back is. In the simplest terms, it’s a way for corporations to enrich their own shareholders and it really gets to this idea of shareholder primacy which has been on the rise since the 1980s and it’s one thing that’s stacked the deck even further against workers and that’s that corporate boards prioritize profit maximization over anything else including workers. And stock buy backs again are a way for shareholders to be further enriched when corporations are doing well like they are under Trump’s tax law. And so this new legislation in the Senate would say by the way stock buy back used to be effectively illegal, that was a huge change and so this legislation, it doesn’t return us to the era of effective prohibition on stock buy backs but what it does say is you need to take care of workers first. So before you do it you need to be offering your workers $15 an hour at least, you need to providing them paid sick leave and you need to offer them some kind of reasonable retirement and health benefit package. That would go further than what is currently required to help workers and I hope it’s a step in the right direction to reverse this huge shift in power and this unstoppable trend of workers losing power to the benefit of the wealthy and corporations.

VALLAS: I want to also flag one more good news piece out of Congress this week. There’s actually a really exciting hearing on raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We’re seeing Democrats get to hold that as one of their first hearings now that they’re holding gavels in the House. That’s happening this week as well and by the time this is going to air will already have happened. And I want to plug my dear colleague Rachel West who came out with some really, really eye opening analysis this week around that hearing. Of course listeners will know she was on the show just a few weeks ago nerding out real hard on this topic so you know what I’m about to say is hugely important. And that is that a minimum wage worker earning that $7.25 that hasn’t been raised in a decade because congressional Republicans have just continued to give the middle finger to our lowest paid workers in this country. Minimum wage workers have taken such significant pay cuts year after year in real terms because their wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation that now a minimum wage worker in 2019 has literally effectively taken a pay cut compared to their 2009 wages that’s about what they make in an entire year. Just think about that, it’s almost more than $13,000 is the net cumulative pay cut that they’re taking since the last time Congress raised the federal minimum wage. So something to chew on as you’re thinking about Democrats have the potential to do if they actually control multiple levers of government.

BOLT: And all of these issues compound, the buying power of the minimum wage erodes, a worker’s power relative to their employer continues to diminish, a new tax law passes that further advantages the wealthy but leaves workers behind, all of this is happening at the same time and it tells a really clear story of why the economy is the way it is and why it’s so hard for workers to get a fair shake.

VALLAS: And meanwhile we’ve got the states continuing to move forward just this week, New Jersey became the latest state to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Yay, New Jersey, yay, what that will mean for New Jersey workers, a full time worker paid the state’s current minimum wage at $8.85 an hour right now they earn $350 a week which is a little more than $18,000 a year, that is not even close to what you need to live on. But $15 an hour, that same worker is going to earn $600 a week and $31,000 a year, over 1 million New Jerseyians will get a raise so hugely good news out of New Jersey.

BOLT: Absolutely.

VALLAS: Even though they think it’s not ok to be able to pump your own gas, which we’re just going to leave in it’s own category because I know that’s something that [INAUDIBLE]

BOLT: Surely there’s a podcast we could find on that.

VALLAS: I suspect there are probably other people who have feelings.

BOLT: What is the story there?

VALLAS: Feelings about that, so we gotta close with what we’re reading this week, Chad, which is a piece over at TalkPoverty that actually is incredibly touching and also heart breaking on a lot of levels, I want to give it a plug. The title is “Poverty Forces People to Surrender Their Pets, It Doesn’t Have to be This Way” by Linda Lombardi, one of our contributors, check it out if you haven’t already and curious to hear from listeners what they think about that piece, which has been getting a lot of different mixed reactions because it looks not just at struggling humans in poverty but also their animal friends and family.

BOLT: Yep.

VALLAS: So Chad, see you next week?

BOLT: I’ll be back next week!

VALLAS: Really, really hope w’ere not in a shutdown when we’re talking.

BOLT: So next week, I’m glad you mentioned it, we will hopefully know what the outcome of the conference committee is, you may remember that House and Senate Democrats and Republicans are meeting, trying to come up with a way to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the rest of the year. What we want is no new funding for the wall, CBP or ICE, I think that’s perfectly achievable, I think there’s even indications from Senate Republicans that this time around they’d avoid another shutdown and pass something like that. So we do need Democrats to stand strong on it. And we are planning, our Indivisible groups across the country are planning office visits next week. So go to Indivisible.org and find out how you can jump in on this because next week is the week that Congress is going to vote on something and we’ll find out next week if we are looking at another shutdown or not.

VALLAS: And wow is that a note to end on. Will we or won’t we be in shutdown? Whatever the situation is, I look forward to doing it with you.

BOLT: Can’t wait to be back.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, talking about the public defender crisis that’s nationwide and especially in Louisiana.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. As anyone who’s seen an episode of “Law and Order” can recite from memory I would guess, you have the right to an attorney, if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you, and on and on. That right to counsel in criminal cases has long been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. But what good is a right to counsel if the public defender provided to you is juggling 194 or maybe even more other criminal cases? Few aspects of America’s broken criminal justice system get less attention than the public defender crisis. Years of underfunding have blown a huge hole in the constitutional right to counsel, literally setting up a two-tiered system of justice based on income. A recent in-depth New York Times article delved into the state of the public defender crisis in America, lifting up a harrowing study by the American Bar Association, zoomed in on Louisiana in particular, which in many ways could be called ground zero of this crisis. There’s no one better situated to shine a light on the day to day reality of the Louisiana’s public defender crisis than Derwyn Bunton, he’s the Orleans Chief District Defender. Thank so much for taking the time Derwyn.

DERWYN BUNTON: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So I feel like before we even get into what’s going on today on the ground or any of these numbers from that New York Times piece or the ABA study, we got to roll the clock back and start at the beginning. So I’m going to ask you to do that and help us along here by asking you to help tell the story of how we have a right to counsel and it takes us to a court case called Gideon.

BUNTON: Well yeah, it takes us to the seminal court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, but even before that. The right to counsel or it’s favor in this country predates our republic, almost 250 years ago it was our [second] president John Adams who represented soldiers for free at the beginning in our republic in what was then called the Boston Massacre. They were poor, unpopular, they were here by an occupying force facing the death penalty, all of them for shooting at civilians. And what would become the start of the American Revolution, so the idea that you shouldn’t face the government without counsel actually predates our republic. Now you fast forward to Gideon v. Wainwright, and that is where the Supreme Court said that having counsel to defend oneself when you’re accused is necessary to achieve justice in our criminal justice system. No one should go without counsel and it was the government’s responsibility to provide that protection as it’s outlined in the 6th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Gideon was a poor drifter from Florida who, if you looked at pictures he was actually in his forties, he looks much older than that, some one who was weathered, he wasn’t the first person to ask for a lawyer, he was the first person that the Supreme Court listened to and decided that you know what, it’s simply not fair for someone to be pailed into court, to have to represent themselves and to do so without a lawyer is just contrary to any notions of justice. And so that brings us to present day, and we now have a patchwork of ways that the states in our country provide defense for people who are too poor to afford a lawyer.

VALLAS: So help unpack that a little bit. You just mentioned that there’s tremendous variation in the way that this is handled state to state, would love to hear you talk a little bit about Louisiana in particular but maybe give us a little bit of that national perspective of here we have this right to counsel enshrined in the Sixth Amendment in the Constitution, this court case played a huge roll in that. And I love that you brought us all the way back to the Founding Fathers as well. So this is not some kind of new or radical idea and yet how is it that we’re in a place where this right is really theoretical at best if you’re one of the four in five criminal defendants who are too poor to be able to afford a lawyer?

BUNTON: I think it’s good to really look at what’s going on around the country because you see different systems. Some that are centralized at the state level and what the Supreme Court said is that the states are responsible for providing counsel to poor people in criminal proceedings and that the 6th Amendment dictates that and I think there’s a lot of people who believe that we have always had the right to counsel. It’s one of the original ten amendments to the Constitution, it’s not even something like, it’s not like 20th or something, it was one of the original ten. The joke I tell is that the Founding Fathers didn’t get rid of slavery but they gave us all lawyers. That’s how important the right was to them, and what you see around the country after that decision is different ways people try to provide counsel. So you have state centralized systems like in Minnesota, you have county systems, that’s the way California largely runs their system, counties provide it in accordance with the Constitution. Pennsylvania does it by county and the state provides zero support, zero resources on the ground level and leaves it up to the counties to provide counsel and to provide the right.

And in Louisiana you have a system with a centralized state board that regulates service delivery. But the funding is what is unique to Louisiana we are a user pay criminal justice system. And by that I mean statewide public defense is paid for by fines and fees and costs levied against the people going through the criminal justice system. About two thirds of public defender budgets on average depend on these fines, fees, and costs, and they’re aimed at the poorest people in our communities. So that’s why you have the crises from year to year in Louisiana because you simply don’t have the resources. And without the resources you also don’t have effective accountability for how poor communities are being served by public defenders around the state.

VALLAS: I’d love to have you get a little concrete here in terms of what this actually looks like on the ground. For anyone who hasn’t read that truly harrowing New York Times piece, which has some interactive components to it, a lot of numbers, it throws a lot of statistics out there, things like a particular lawyer that it was profiling who actually was a former public defender in Louisiana. His name is Mr. Talaska, he would have needed almost 10,000 hours or five years of full time work to handle the 194 active felony cases that he had on one particular day when the Times was following him around the courthouse. That didn’t even include the death row case that he had on his docket because that wasn’t really how they could crunch the numbers for purposes of that analysis. And it didn’t even include the more cases that were going to come onto his docket so there’s lots of these kinds of statistics that are in this piece. But help us get a little bit more concrete here in human terms. How does this play out when you end up having lawyers such as those in your office shouldering these kinds of unbelievably stacked up case loads, what does that actually look like?

BUNTON: Well in scientific terms it looks a mess is what it looks like.

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VALLAS: That’s the technical term.

BUNTON: And so painting a process picture if you are arrested and too poor to afford a lawyer in New Orleans and we’re much like the rest of the state, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be brought in front of a judge, that judge is going to figure out if you are eligible for public defender services and 85% of people who appear before judges who are arrested will qualify for public defender services for felony cases in particular. Once you are eligible you immediately owe the public defender $40, that is the administrative fee for being eligible. Then as your case works its way through the system if you are found guilty or plead guilty, you owe the public defender another $45. If your case is dismissed or you’re found not guilty, then you owe nothing, you owe nothing to the public defender’s office. And when you think back and think about it and rest on it for a second, what you realize is that public defenders are paid to lose. If you are not guilty the public defender receives, or at least is owed payment, if you are not guilty the public defenders office receives nothing. When we had [INAUDIBLE] to the office from the Players’ Coalition, for the NFL Player’s Coalition who are doing listening and learn, the way I put it to them was these are people who are familiar with lawyers, what if your lawyer did everything right and because of it you owed them nothing? What kind of world would that be for the NFL if everytime they negotiated a successful contract you owed them absolutely nothing. And so you see this from the water, from the groundwater it is infected with these terrible incentives.

And in human terms what it means for a place like New Orleans, Louisiana, you have a per capita wrongful conviction rate that is the second highest in the country. You have what was the incarceration capital of the world. We are now I believe number two, and you have clients who miss work, who miss school, who miss birthdays because their biggest crime is they’re poor and they are subject to this system which means you get a lawyer who has very little time to give to any single particular case. For us, that came to a head in 2016 when I looked up and I was reading about a shooting where someone was falsely accused. And they were in jail, $1.8 million bond, the mayor called it an act of terrorism, it was a shooting at a playground and they were able to get cobbled together enough money for a private attorney who was able to verify that man’s alibi, he was actually in Houston at the time of the crime. And I looked at that and I said if that were us, I’m not sure we’d have time to get to that footage in Houston before it was a race, before it was discarded, before memories blurred. And we literally stopped taking cases; we had reached our limit in terms of standards and said we’re not ethically able to handle anyvmore cases. And in in 2016, we stopped doing it and we gave back more than 1,000 cases to the system and itvwas one of those things that was very difficult to do. You don’t do this, this is to say no to poor people in trouble but you can do irreparable harm to a case without proper resources, without the time to give to a client.

VALLAS: And people may actually remember this because it made not just national news, it was on programming with John Oliver, a lot of attention because you guys didn’t just make that decision that you couldn’t continue to handle this appalling number of cases and needed to hand some back but you guys actually started crowd funding, trying to fund the defense that you didn’t have the adequate resources to provide.

BUNTON: It was true. We were looking at serious cuts, we were looking at perhaps layoffs, certainly furloughs of staff. And it was something no other part of the system was being asked to do. Going back to the question of how is it that we get this right and it’s being delivered in such a patchwork, ad hoc kind of way? And so to bring attention and to perhaps stave off some of the worse of the cuts we were going to need to do, we started crowdfunding campaign and it caught the attention of John Oliver on HBO and we were really encouraged at the support we were seeing not just from around the country but around the world who thought that this was something unheard of in a nation like the United States, that you would need to crowdfund to protect one of the ten original amendments to the Constitution, just think about that. Think about if the NRA is holding bake sales to secure your Second Amendment rights or if the New York Times, LA Times, has to ring a bell with a pot while you throw money into a kettle in front of Wal-Mart to ensure your First Amendment rights. It seems otherworldly that the document that is the foundation of our country to protect it and to provide resources to breathe life into a part of it you’d have to crowd source but that’s exactly what we did. And the response actually allowed us to bring some attention and some decision makers here locally and statewide would provide additional resources along with individuals to stave off layoffs and furloughs for our office.

VALLAS: Now I gotta be honest between you and me and however many people are listening, Derwyn I’d rather see the NRA have to hold bake sales than see you guys having to crowdfund so that people aren’t locked up for the crime of being poor, but that’s just me but hey, I’m with you in spirit if we’re talking about enforcement of constitutional rights in more than just theoretical ways. Derwyn, share if you don’t mind maybe a story or two of people who are the types of defendants your office has represented or had to turn away and what this inadequate funding has meant in the terms of real people’s lives.

BUNTON: Well, one client that comes to mind was actually profiled in our 60 Minutes appearance, this goes to when we were refusing cases, they profiled a client on 60 Minutes and that client had been sitting in jail for longer than he should have been because we simply had too many cases on our docket, too many cases, too few lawyers, we had a law professor who stepped in and took that case because we had refused it, was able to give it some time, review the evidence and figure out that the evidence actually did not match our client. That given what the police report stated the evidence that was provided and the camera footage, the video footage that accompanied the crime, she figured out that it wasn’t our client. And she was able to do that sooner rather than later and that is important because maybe we would have figured it out, we did after all have all the evidence in hand, we were able to turn it over.

But because of overworked lawyers in our office, it’s possible we may not have been able to put the pieces together or put them together so very much later that you lose additional client of the client’s life, time away from their family, from their community, or and this is the saddest part of our system that really needs to be talked about as well, that clients will is simply broken and they’ll take whatever deal is given to them to get out of jail, whether they did it or not because jail sucks. Nobody wants to sit in jail and that case was highlighted in 60 minutes and that is not unusual to think that hey you might miss something if you’ve got too much work to do.

Recently we’ve been looking at cases where clients are pleading guilty on drug charges, we had a case where a client sat in jail, was given a deal, took the deal, the tests came back on the drugs and we find out that there were no drugs, they simply were not illegal. The client simply did not want to stay any more time in jail. And the way the system operates to tell you why a poorly resourced system to cause irreparable harm, you now have that client deciding to reverse that plea and having to fight even though the evidence says that the drugs were not illegal drugs, but because the courts do not want to reverse the plea. The system is based on finality after all, so having to say in what seems almost an absurd situation, hey, can I have that conviction reversed, can I have that plea taken back, there were no illegal drugs and the system saying uh uh, too late you already plead. That’s kind of ridiculous and I don’t think folks understand that that’s the kind of ordinary injustice that happens day to day and can happen with impunity if you don’t have a system like a public defense system that is equitably funded and ready to call out these injustices and hold power accountable. And we’ve got those stories that happen every single day.

VALLAS: And Derwyn, lest anyone think that this is somehow some kind of experience that is limited to Louisiana or some small number of people across the country 94% of convictions in state courts come from plea bargains. That’s actually data that come to us from a Supreme Court ruling that not that many years back confirmed that the right to counsel should include the right to be represented by competent counsel not just at trial but also in plea negotiations but a big part of what you’re actually talking about here is that we’ve got these incentives then within this system for people to be pleading guilty to things they didn’t do because it will get them out of jail sooner and in a position where they’re able to get back to their lives, to their jobs, their families, their housing but now they’ve got a criminal record that they shouldn’t have hanging over their heads in ways that boy we’ve talked about this a lot on this show because of where my heart lies but in ways that can sentence them to poverty for life because now they have that criminal record. That’s what you’re describing right now being baked into this system because people aren’t in a position where their lawyers have the time that they very much want to devote to adequately representing their clients.

BUNTON: And that strikes at the very core of why this right is so important and what we see playing now over time is that if you do not have a system of public defense, if you do not have a system to provide counsel to poor people. What happens is you have poor people going to jail in greater numbers faster and for things they didn’t do. And you see collateral consequences growing because there is no force against it. There is nothing humanizing these clients that are caught in this system who are your friends, your neighbors, your loved ones and it’s only now that the system has gotten so huge and cuts so many people and by the way, becomes so expensive that we’re now thinking about reform. That reform still is forgetting that at the front door are public defenders to make sure that we hold power accountable, defend innocence and that we are able to yes in times where we have to and where we should in a civilized society stand next to a client and shepherd them through a system so that they can accept responsibility with dignity.

I was radicalized in this work as a young lawyer when we sued juvenile prisons here in Louisiana. And I’ve looked at file after file after file with scant work done to protect these young people from a system that was holding them in these juvenile prisons across Louisiana from in case from age 11 to age 21. And I remember distinctly one of the most prescient moments for me was sitting on a concrete floor in a room with a client, a young adolescent boy who was actually naked because they deemed clothing too dangerous for him because of his mental health problems and his suicide attempts. And I’m talking to him, interviewing him about conditions in the prison as he’s got scars and dried blood on different parts of his body and wondering how this young boy gets here. How in my America he gets to this moment in a jail instead of treatment. And it’s because the system that should be defending him, that should be equitably resourced and properly respected as part of the original ten amendments to the Constitution is simply not doing its job humanizing him, calling power out and making sure he gets to the place where he needs to get. And I think that’s what folks need to understand in this reform moment, that’s the place we need to get to, that is the light, the house on the hill for public defense. We just want to be able to do our jobs as contemplated by John Adams and our Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright.

VALLAS: So Derwyn in the last few minutes that we have, I hate surfacing crisis level problems and then leaving it there. I also want to try to close with solutions so that people can be armed with the information about what we can be doing to try to address this problem. And the good news is we actually know a lot of what we need to be doing here. We’re just not doing it. Talk to me a little bit about what we know about this types of standards that if they were in place could ensure that people are receiving an adequate defense and that public defenders are able to provide that adequate defese and how some of the new data that are being developed and numbers that are being crunched and distributed like in this New York Times piece might be part of making the case for those kinds of standards.

BUNTON: Well I think starting with The New York Times piece doing real time realistic studies about what it takes to handle a case in a modern criminal justice system from the standpoint of as is. So accepting our system of criminal prosecution, practice, justice as it is, what is really needed? And these Times studies really illustrate to everyone that hey we’ve got a problem and the probabilities of getting it wrong for people are really high and not only is it high but we’re actually seeing those errors and we’re now responding to those errors and we understand that there are ways to back up and figure that out.

So one is based on demonstrated empirical needs, you provide resources, you can add resources to public defender offices, to assign counsel systems, whatever it may be in your jurisdiction to handle the work but I think that’s also something that has to be viewed holistically in our system. So we also have examples of holistic practices in the Bronx Defenders in places, growing holistic practices like Philly, places like Brooklyn, we’ve got promising practices throughout California where you see public defenders’ offices wrapping their arms around clients and being able to stabilize them in their communities so that one, they don’t return to the public defenders office, don’t return to our criminal justice system. But two, to set off on a path of doing better, doing better for themselves and for their communities, and I think also in that broader look, shrinking our criminal justice system so we don’t criminalize so much, we don’t overreact to the conduct that we have now been criminalizing over the last few decades so that we can actually afford to take care of people and keep our communities safe. And I think it starts with looking at where are the resources needed and asking why we need those resources and that’s when you really start thinking about well maybe we don’t have to jail every trespasser, maybe we can provide more treatment than punishment for some of the drug offenses and maybe that will work.

And we’re seeing some of that here, we’ve got bond and bail reform in New Orleans, we’ve got a bond project that we have funding from the MacArthur Foundation of, we’re seeing reductions in our jail population in New Orleans that haven’t been seen in decades. Post-Katrina, right before Katrina there were 7,000 people in our jail, I think our last population count had us at about 1,100 population there and that’s because of hard work and reform. That includes public defenders arguing and moving people away from jail and into their homes, that’s just one example.

VALLAS: And I appreciate so much you drawing those connections between not just the increased funding that’s obviously needed and rethinking and updating outdated standards as we’ve been talking about. But also reducing the over-criminalization of so many behaviors that are really just about survival. We talked last week on this show actually about the man in New York City who was homeless living on the streets and ends up being given a “reduced sentence” of six years in prison because he was trying to buy food and toothpaste with a fake $20 bill. For anyone who cares about criminal justice reform and this is one of those rare areas of bipartisan agreement in a lot of regards, adequately funding our public defender system and hand in hand decriminalizing so many types of “offenses” that have no business being crimes in the 21st century in America is absolutely what we need to be doing. I’ve been speaking with Derwyn Bunton, he’s the Orleans chief district defender and very much on the ground in ground zero of the public defender crisis. Derwyn thank you so much for taking the time and of all of our work to lift this up so that hopefully our policymakers can take some steps in the right direction.

BUNTON: And thank you for inviting me on.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.