Next Week, Congress Will Ruin The Country In The Following Ways

The sequester is going to be one big disaster muffin. How will it screw up the legal profession? Pretty badly actually.

You know who else works for the Judiciary? The Federal Defenders, along with a platoon of private attorneys who get paid by the courts to defend indigent clients per the Criminal Justice Act. There’s talk of cutting back on salaries for the Federal Defenders (an anonymous tipster suggested their salaries could be cut upwards of 40%), and payments to private lawyers may be suspended entirely.

Moral of the story is that the justice system is about to get a lot rougher for poor folks accused of federal crimes. I guess, luckily for them, there won’t be any FBI agents left to arrest them.

The Bill of Rights specifically guarantees defendants the right to counsel, the right to a speedy trial and the right to a jury trial. The definition of “speedy” may come under new scrutiny if the sequester causes the courts to pare back their workload and delay some trials.

So the right to counsel is in the Bill of Rights somewhere buried behind the right to spend hundreds of millions on political campaigns and the right to own a bazooka for home security (if we outlaw bazookas, only outlaws will have bazookas).
Obviously, a massive salary cut is not as bad as an outright layoff, but that’s the sort of cut that might just make a lawyer reevaluate a career choice. And when the Federal Defenders depart en masse and private firms suddenly find they’re too busy to take on CJA cases, there’s a constitutional challenge in the offing.

The courts are also talking about smooth canceling civil jury trials because they can’t afford to pay jurors. There’s already been an uproar over suspensions of civil trials at the state level. Ostensibly, folks are concerned over the erosion of civil justice, but I think people are really concerned about losing a great excuse to skip work and catch up on Nora Roberts novels (or at least J.D. Robb novels).

So the sequestration looks like it’s going to be putting a bunch of lawyers back on the street.

Look, I understand the need to do something immediately about the national debt. Oh wait, I don’t. The most common analogy I always hear is, “look a household has to balance its budget.” Putting aside the ridiculous idea that the government managing the most important currency in the world is akin to a suburban household, this analogy seems to forget that most Americans have mortgages. You know, that massive hunk of debt equal to about two times annual income. Well the U.S. debt is currently just equal to GDP and when you recognize that almost half of this scary “debt” is actually owed right back to U.S. itself (an accounting trick that June and Ward Cleaver aren’t pulling off) the debt is actually not that scary in the short-term. Certainly not scary enough to derail civil and criminal justice. Let alone to Gillooly the economic recovery.

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Oh, before I forget. Will the GOP-initiated sequester protect funding for civil legal assistance?

Yeah, I should have guessed that.

Security, Justice Are Big Cost of Sequester [Politico]
Media Silent On Potential Sequestration Effects That Could Hamper DOJ Civil Enforcement Actions [Media Matters]
Federal Bench Braces for the Blow [CQ]
Legal Aid Groups Lose Big If Federal Budget Slashed [National Law Journal]
The Slow Death of Justice [Huffington Post]

Earlier: New D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Dreading the Sequester

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