Our priorities have gone askew. Never has this been clearer to me than today, viewing from afar the circus surrounding an apparent once-in-a-decade event gathering steam: the utterance of words out loud by a Supreme Court Justice. Yes, he spoke. Yes, he said something incomprehensible. Yes, he and Scalia were making fun of Yale and Harvard. And that, apparently, is newsworthy. That, apparently, has been the impetus for hundreds of posts and BREAKING NEWS items and thousands of wasted pixels speculating exactly what he meant. Has the streak been broken, the L.A. Times – which I thought was a reputable newspaper, but apparently not – asks of its readers and also somewhat funnily has this sentence in the same article:
It’s a slow news day at the U.S. Supreme Court when the biggest story is whether an overheard, offhand comment by Justice Clarence Thomas means he has broken his nearly seven-year streak of silence.
It’s a slow news day if you don’t really care about the issue of the massive funding crisis that is threatening indigent defense across the country; it’s a slow news day if you’re too fucking stupid to realize that everyone’s due process rights are about to take it in a most impolite way if it’s okay for the State to hold someone for 5 years without giving them a trial. It’s a slow news day if writing about Justice Thomas uttering half a sentence at the Supreme Court is what you do when you’re waiting for Lindsay Lohan to fire another lawyer.
I’m amazed at the number of articles that keep popping up in my feed reader about Thomas and his words of wisdom. Hell, the New Yorker got into it to remind us that, in their opinion, Thomas really hates Yale. Liptak engages in a Zapruder film like frame-by-frame analysis of what this man might’ve uttered. I could go on and on with links, but you get the point.
You know what’s missing in every single one of these articles? A mention of Boyer. Who’s Boyer, you ask? Boyer, of Boyer v. Louisiana [SCOTUSBlog preview; oral argument transcript here]. Boyer, who sat in jail for 5 years facing the death penalty because the State could afford to only pay one of his lawyers – one that wasn’t qualified to represent him in a death penalty case. Boyer, in whose case witnesses died while he was waiting for the political football of indigent defense funding to stop getting punted around from endzone to endzone like it was a Browns vs. Cardinals game. Boyer, whose egregious delay the state of Louisiana seeks to shrug off as not really important and certainly not their fault.
The State of Louisiana which had the gall to argue before Justice Thomas and the rest of the Court that using funds to pay prosecutors to prosecute crimes but not defense lawyers to defend against those crimes is not a “deliberate choice”. It’s the same State that will argue that it’s the fault of the poor, jailed defendant with an 8th-grade education that he wasn’t tried for 5 years after arrest. It’s the same State that thinks it’s okay for him to proceed to defend a death penalty case with counsel who is ineffective.
You want a story? I’ll give you a story: this is the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright. That the decision trumpeted the arrival of an era of equal justice for all, but that era has never materialized. That states still woefully underfund indigent defense; that access to justice isn’t equal and that people get screwed. Every. Single. Day. And it’s this Court – Thomas and others – who have the authority to change that, to alter that reality for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Today for all my clients; tomorrow, perhaps for you.
But no. Let’s continue to be cute and write funny stories about what an odd man that Justice Thomas is that he hasn’t asked a question in 6 years and well, was he making fun of Harvard or Yale? Because, really, who gives a fuck about Boyer, right? Stupid Constitution getting in the way, just like Thomas always said.
Priorities.
TL;DR: Thomas mumbles, internet creams itself, Boyer sits in jail, Gideon weeps.
[Update: Sorry, couldn't resist this update. After my rant above, I stumbled across this stunningly bizarre, tone-deaf, self-important post by Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSBlog, who, apparently, chides the internet not for taking a serious issue and making light of it like I do, but almost the opposite: for taking the joke too seriously. That's some fucking serious level of meta that even I haven't been able to get to in all my years of internet trolling. Well played, TG, well played.]