restraining order. [laughter] so the lesson of that was if we make that case as we try to do in the book for a limited government we will win every time but the centerpiece was obamacare but it is hard when you choose your nominee something that is similar and paralleled in tribute to romney he was proud of that achievement as a way to get ahead politically. . .

>> the man is enjoying his life. let's not wreck it. laugh so. >> last question. >> thank you for your time tonight. my question is regarding an article that daniel hemminger wrote for the journal. maybe a month ago and he basically said that the strategy that republican should employ is to not attack obamacare and it would eventually fall under its own weight. this seems more realistic today than it did then and i was curious what you thought about that and personally i am skeptical because i've never seen entitlement taken away.

he made that argument so i don't know if you are familiar with him but i thought you might have an opinion. >> actually i concur with him. entitlement to be taken away has to be instituted and it has to have some success in being implanted. this could be a very rocky entrance and a bomb-making or may not survive. it's not definitive and it's more likely than not that it will collapse of its own weight. that has been what i was advocating during the shutdown. i thought tactically it was a mistake. there was no reason to call for the overthrow of obamacare by legislation when there is not a chance in hell that you could do that under our system. you really can't undo a law from one house of congress. there is no way it was going to be undone and we were heading into october the first when the shutdown began.

it was also the day when obamacare this brand-new web site was going to revolutionize their health care signed up exactly six people. i mean, that isn't even enough to field a baseball team. there would be no outfield. [laughter] so i don't think that bodes well. there's an old adage that i think i mentioned earlier when the other guys committing suicide, get out of the room. hand him a pistol and maybe make it a little easier and cleaner for the csi people coming in later. but there was no reason to give it away and what republicans ought to do right now they sincerely believe as i do that obamacare is going to hurt the country it is not the way to go about attacking very specific and important problems and that is the uninsured which i think one could attack very narrowly

in a way that wouldn't redo the entire 16 that the u.s. economy. that actually is the essence of liberal overreach. it's what's wrong emanuel said. to waste when he basically said we are going to use this opportunity when we have control of the congress to instituted liberal nationalizing health care. there was no reason to reshape and remake one part of the economy as a way to attack the problem of the uninsured. i think this will in the end, it is very likely to collapse in and of its own weight in the gop has to be ready and conservatives have to be ready to address the moral issue. it's a serious one of the uninsured and we want to make sure all americans have access but there are ways to do it. there are conservative ways to do it, honest ways to do it in which you aren't hiding the cost and pretending and lying about what the effects are going to be if your policy. i think that would be the

essence of a conservative answer. i would say in the end that is going to be the outcome. very likely to be the outcome and we have to be prepared to watch a dissolved and have them alternative and i think that will be relatively -- if we can do that in 2016. [applause] >> i know you have to catch a plane that i didn't want to leave without asking you a question about the past time that you love which is chess. does chess fit into the kind of beautiful and the soft or does it fit into the lyrical? >> its beautiful and the soft and elegant that i know a lot of people consider eccentric. i once drove from washington to new york to watch a chess game. actually i did that twice.

and people just shake their heads when they hear that. and i do have a comment on a pariah chess club where he described the group of us to play on monday nights at my house. speed chess where you race against the clock. it's great fun. we are called a pariah chess club tickets at the time one of the players was charles murray who was not able to safely appear on campuses. the fourth of the founders was a perfectly respectable music critic for the "washington post" that he was grandfathered as the pariah because he associated with the three of us. so that was -- and chess is a very elegant game and there is a lot of music which i try to describe in the pros as a lot of fun but i have to admit that i gave it up a

couple of years ago. i gave it up cold turkey. i was asked why and i said because it's an addiction. it's a poison. you find yourself playing speed chess on the internet at 2:00 in the morning and you realize you are the equivalent of an alcoholic alone in a motel room drinking aqua velvet. [laughter] so i'm on the wagon or off the wagon. i've never been able to figure out which is which but i'm in remission and enjoying it. [applause] >> thank you charles krauthammer for giving us a memorable evening and i think we should leave on that wonderful phrase that you used in your talk, things elegant and beautiful,

hard and demanding is what life is all about. it's been a memorable evening i think for all of us and thank you president bush for being here and happy birthday mrs. bush and thank you again charles krauthammer. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> up next on booktv "after words" with guest host debbie hines former prosecutor and creator of illegals. >> blog. this week abbe smith and angela hines contributing authors to "how can you represent those people?" the director and supervisor of georgetown law school's criminal defense and prisoner advocacy clinic

discussed defense attorneys answers to the professional question they are asked most often, how they are able to do and those crimes. the program is about an hour. >> host: i am so glad to be able to interview you and your book, "how can you represent those people?". as i was telling you before, for me it was a very interesting and thought provoking book and i don't say that lightly because if it weren't i wouldn't say otherwise but it was definitely brought out a lot of emotions from me, anger, sadness, laughter and humor. it takes basically ran the whole gamut so white you start happy by telling us how did you come up with the idea for the book? >> guest: first of all i'm really proud of it so i'm delighted that the response because there is nothing really like it out there. 15 thoughtful essays that answer the question that defense lawyers referred to alternately as either the cocktail party questions and that is where tens

of the astra just plain the question. to have assembled such a diverse crowd was the great tang that half women a quarter african-american men ranging in age from 28 to 85. so the idea and that was part of the idea tooth has different voices and not the usual suspects talking about criminal law. kind of evolved. my coeditor monroe freedman and i co-authored a book which is a traditional law school treatise on legal ethics. that was a really interesting project but it wasn't nearly as fun as this was or is timeless and its timeliness and said there's always a big case that raises that question. i think the two of us were talking about the work that we both do. we are both academics. i still consider myself to be a criminal defense lawyer just fancier gigs than when i was a

public defender in monroe freedman had his own time where he was involved actively in criminal practice. we are both members of an organization called the american border of criminal lawyers so we were kind of aware that there was a need for a book like this and there is a market for it and it would he so fun to put people together to write thoughtfully and personally. i think one of the great things about the look is it has a personal voice to it. >> host: most of the stories and that is what makes it so interesting. they are from the heart in the stories told about the stories that come to mind from the various authors. i know there are 15 different authors that tell us about some of the people who wrote for the book. >> guest: her essay is one of my favorites because she talks about and i will give her a chance to talk about it she talks about the influence that her grandparents were civil rights activist hat on her career path.

some of the others include barbara babcock who i think of as the dean of criminal defenders certainly of the literature. she wrote something a lot of us think of as a kind of classic piece on criminal defense called defending the guilty. it's more than 30 years old now and she writes a new interesting kind of a dated essay. one of my favorite lines from her is she gets the question how can we represent those people from people like her hairdresser and for recently her oncologist. i thought that was a great line. michael is another hero who does this work. he has represented any number of high-profile controversial defendants who has his own typically a signature. he is kind of a renaissance man and he writes about his representation with the oklahoma bombing case.

joe writes about his representation of the guantánamo detainees and authors with a brilliant essay discussion of criminal defense since september september 11 and what their policies were before and after that pivotal event. meghan shapiro and william montrose are the only co-authors and a write about people on death row. i think it's a particularly moving very strong essay about something that most people don't realize. the clients and the client's families and the lawyers themselves. you've really have to kind of take a part of life and put it back together to understand how a person is born in this world to do something so horrible that it seems to prompt the worst punishment of all, death by execution.

piper carrington who teaches at ole miss writes for the district of columbia and one of the funnier essays. he tells about his representation of the woman who he tried to send mail to take a plea and thought it was sheer craziness to go to trial in this case. she was going to get so much time and contrary to visit vice a jury finds her not guilty and it's a wonderful story that i don't want to give away the punchline to. are there others that come to mind? he writes about his experience representing people accused of crime in the role his jewish faith plays. david singleton a former public defender in new york and washington d.c. now writes a criminal justice policy oriented litigation called the ohio justice and policy center and he writes wonderful essay about his efforts up sex offenders a phrase he doesn't especially

like for people convicted of those kinds of defenses. he took on the state of ohio's sex offender registration laws. renting a fledgling donation funded organization to take on the powers that be and makes a strong case about how the american public and elected officials certain kinds of crimes and when a bad crime happens it's very distorting and we do all kinds of misguided things. one of the clothes he makes in the essays are policies and practices with regard to people convicted of sexual offenses makes them more dangerous. we isolate them and we marginalize them. we don't let them reintegrate into their families or communities so they become more dangerous and i think that's a smart thing to share. he has a personal voice about how he represents people who do hideous things. >> host: that is one of the

things i wanted to explain other than it was just different age groups and races because just the compilation of people you got, it was so interesting to read their different perspectives because they really in my point of view they really weren't doing the same type of representation. they were doing all types of representations but still and we will talk about some of the issues and the problems and the flaws with the system. abbe i don't want you to do all the talking. why do you tell us about your background and how you came to represent the clients he represents? >> guest: represents? >> guest: first of all i'm so pleased that abbe included me in the book. i came to this for as i was inspired by my grandfather's legacy. my grandfather was a civil rights advocate and he was -- he came of age in the 60s in mississippi and he was part of the naacp and the voters league.

he and his family were targeted. this was before i was born. that inspired me and i went off to college and then to law school. i wanted to be a civil rights attorney. as i started to look into what kind of law i wanted to practice is spent some time in mississippi working on a class-action case on behalf of the death row inmates in mississippi and that was my first real exposure to the criminal justice system. later i spent a summer working at the san francisco public defender and i saw a lot of parallels. the state is 50% african-american but san francisco is less than 5% of the population yet all of our clients or a big majority of our clients were black and it ran that gambit unlike you representing people in mississippi charged with serious offenses. in san francisco i was working on behalf of clients at every

stage of misdemeanors and felonies so when i saw that i was really inspired to do this kind of work. i also spent time in the clinic when i was in law school, the juvenile defender clinic and saw that every single one of our clients was african-american and some of them with petty offenses as you can imagine. i tell a story about a kid who kicked a soccer ball at a police officer and was charged with assaulting a police officer and snowballs being thrown with kids being charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. those sorts of things stuck out with me. kids go-go to schooling get in a fight at school and had the police called. that never happened at the prep school that i went to on scholarship. the police would never be called so seeing the way our criminal justice system unfairly targets people of color and poor people is what inspired me to do this work. >> host: there are several takeaways i got from i think it

is your chapter that the mess age ended up -- you and did a ding a civil rights attorney. one of the greatest civil rights problem we have is the mass incarceration of lacks in i was struck by one of the stories in the book about a woman who was charged with prostitution for giving a to an undercover police officer. obviously she was hungry and those are people if you are on probation there are those kinds of problems. in terms of the mass incarceration issue and by way of background for people that are listening i was also struck because i have heard it worded different ways. i was struck at the fact that there are more black men particularly in jail and the criminal justice system either waiting for trial have had a trial or -- that is staggering because that puts it into perspective of what

we are we are talking about with mass incarceration. i talked to people and in some of the people that i talk to that are more conservative, they say black people commit more crimes. i just want to have you guys speak to the problem of mass incarceration and how do we get to it. how did we get there and what are some of the policy issues we can deal with to work towards a more just system? >> guest: is certainly horrifying the statistics. one in three african-american babies born today are destined for jail if our policies of mass incarceration continue. it's just certainly a civil rights issue of our time and a human rights issue of our time. and look at the conditions of our jails in this country are like. i think when you hear people say african-americans are more likely to commit crimes, it

really is unfair. there are neighborhoods are unfairly targeted. if you take drug use for example, african-americans are actually less like he to use and abuse illegal substances but the chances of them going to prison and jail for committing those offenses is so disproportionate. and so when you look at these numbers there really is something that i hope these people step back and look at. >> host: i know eric holder is trying to at least do something with regard to lessening sentences for the nonviolent cases but beyond that and i don't know if this is your area but beyond that are there things you can do that you guys are representing people on a day-to-day basis in the past but that is only assisting the

system. that's not doing anything to change the system. >> guest: that's a fair question and sometimes we are asked, are you really affecting social change or social justice by representing individual criminal defendants, poor people accused of a crime? i actually think and i share vida's view that criminal defense and social work is criminal justice work in human rights work. i think it's a social justice work of our time because in that individual representation you are making a difference in an individual life and i think you are casting some light on a really terrible problem. we know, those of us in the trenches every day, something has to give. at a certain point. i would like to be optimistic about eric holder. i was glad that he spoke out. he probably should have spoken up sooner. i wish he would do more and i

hope u.s. attorneys around the country are doing what eric holder suggests they do it not that the quantity of drugs in the criminal charging documents and there is some flexibility in sentencing because it's so harsh in the federal system especially but also in the states. i also think we are misguided and this is a more controversial thing to say because we often your people talking about releasing people from prison for committing nonviolent offenses. the truth is we keep people in for way too long for all kinds of offenses even violent offenses. people commit crimes for a host of reasons. some art deep systemic social reasons but others are in a bad moment in a moment of rage out of impulse. there is a reason that crime seems to be disproportionately young people between the ages of 18 to 25 because studies show

that our brains are not fully formed yet, that the frontal part of the brain is still growing. that's the part that helps us to control our impulses but a lot of people do a foolish thing in a moment of loss of control and more people are dying in prisons. they are not posing a risk or danger to other people at a certain point. we spend gobs of money which raises a moral reason to let people out but we are outliers is a western democracy. there is no other country that resembles our country. they lock people up for as long time and conditions they lock people up in. i think it's a little bit crazy trade i think we should prosecute fewer people and there should be no diversion. 50 years after there some kind of celebration for we marked the occasion with a bunch of hang wringing -- hand wringing that we have never

funded criminal defense and there is a rich person's justice and poor person's justice. the can't afford it then stop persecuting so many people for such silly crimes. treat some things as public health problems or social problems. deferred them, chile divert them and don't exactly guilty plea that deal with them someplace else and let's see if we can't reintegrate people into society a little bit better. there are some neighborhoods in the district of columbia, some neighborhoods where you don't see young black man. he just don't see them. it's staggering and why is that? isn't the district of columbia like los angeles and the rock's? there are certain places where one into african-american men are in the system and our law up or on probation or parole. it seems to me to be such a misguided self-destructive set of policies. >> host: as you know i'm a

prosecutor but when i prosecuted there were questions i had. i was never in juvenile but started with misdemeanor. why am i prosecuting a guy that stole deodorant from the cbs? i even have those questions in my mind at least is a woman of color as some of the things were prosecuted as misdemeanors back then, why are we in court because he went back to the deodorant issue of? like the woman in your book, the person who does the on the cob. you also talk about not just a system itself in terms of the actual -- he spoke briefly about it now and the parole system that we love people up and throw away the key. we don't really -- the sentences if you did the

crime let them do the time but there are some times that -- so you tell about two persons, to clients in your buck without giving away everything but tell us about those because it does show in real life the shawshank redemption movement is for real. >> guest: i tell the story about 3 feet of, two of whom are still incarcerated for incredibly long sentences. 116 years old and that was the childish impulse kind of crime. he shot his neighbor. he had been expelled from school and was afraid of his father's reaction so he took his father's hunting rifle and went next door to scare the woman next door into giving him her car keys so he could get away so his father wouldn't beat the hell out of him for getting trouble at school. he had never been in trouble and wasn't someone who is involved with the juvenile justice system. apparently she said no, maybe

left and he shot her. he is 45 years old now. he has been imprisoned since he was 16 years old. all i can say is he looks at the 45-year-old, 16-year-old. there's something about him that will forever be 16 years old. i don't have any doubt that he poses no risk of harm to any other human being and this is something he is deeply remorseful about and deeply ashamed. he just doesn't want to die in prison and hangs onto a slim piece of hope that one day he will be free. i represent a woman who killed her baby. she was convicted of killing her baby. she has no memory of it. she denied it. she went to trial. i have no idea of course would have in. it's not surprising to me that a mother might dissociate if she did such a thing that she would have no memory. i think that's a terribly traumatic thing whatever the

circumstances are that cause women to kill their babies but meanwhile she was supposed to serve 20 years. the judge was explicit in the sentencing and his even her a 20 year sentence. she has now served 28 years. the parole system is not letting her out. she is a model prisoner. she works in the prison infirmary and the chaplain's office. she is will past the age of having babies and can do harm to them. i really just don't get it. i understand these aren't popular prisoners and i'm standards a risk in our anticrime culture of politics but somebody needs to let these people out eventually. you're right about the parole system in the probation system. it's become like a revolving door. shoving people and to prison and

then they get out for a second and they are back in. why? they are not good at following rules and they're not well-organized. we have this appointment and that appointment and we have kids. there are days when we want to say i can control my schedule. for clients is not easy. they have their parole officer in their probation officer and they have a drug treatment and they have anger management. if they miss one of those appointments or if they don't have us money or can't figure out how to get someplace they are in violation. they lock up so many people for those kinds of technical violations falling off the wagon getting frustrated or falling into despair and turning to drugs or alcohol and then they are back in prison. i think that is awfully misguided too. >> host: vida i'm sure you have some of your own stories. what are some of the good bad and ugly things that happened in the prison system? >> guest: you are speaking

about resources. in the misdemeanor practice i worked with a clinic with abbe and we see every day people with minor crimes and i will say 79% of crimes in our criminal justice are misdemeanor so when we talk about the criminal justice system that is most of what we are talking about. over and over again we see a sense of access to substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment and those would be things that would have prevented people from ever entering into the criminal justice system in the first place. it's just so shameful in my view that you have to get arrested in order to get access to these services. when you talk about resources of those things were available the communities that are clients lipton it's a lot of money incarcerating people on average $40,000 a year to incarcerate

someone. the supervision and jeb treatment and mental health treatment to solve these problems. >> host: i'm not asking you to name them. >> guest: you see time and time you can pet the offenses that are being prosecuted. one of my cases a kid was prosecuted for stealing a birthday card for his little brother. those sorts of things are happening in superior court in d.c. and all across the country. >> host: that's just so sad. we are basically running a court system with a lot of misdemeanors. that's a very good point to get out the majority of the cases in the system are misdemeanor because the projection in view in the world is we have to take these murders and rapists and

killers and that is what is shown in the media so that is what people really think. they are not thinking about the kid who bought the birthday card card -- will he didn't buy the birthday card. the kid who basically went in and stole the birthday card without thinking about that. tell us some of the more rewarding things you have that occur. >> guest: you know the thing about representing a human being , that experience in and of itself can be rewarding. standing up to someone, it's next to someone in standing up to the government in and of itself can be its own reward when your client doesn't have anyone to stand up for them and doesn't have any other support. the prosecutors against them, the police are against them and there is a judge who is sort of in the middle being someone's advocate is priceless.

to win a jury trial or any trial is a great experience. hearing the words not guilty are every defense attorneys favorite thing. >> host: some of the problems that the clients have oftentimes there is not even family there in the courtroom with them because of all the socioeconomic issues with perhaps their dysfunctional or otherwise family which really does bring up the point that what we need is some form of noncriminal intervention. we need more services for people which doesn't look like we are on that track but that's another topic. >> guest: you're absolutely right. if we can focus on the resources that we focus on the criminal justice system elsewhere root save money and live in a safer country.

>> guest: attention to sing to me that one of the comments in the book and weekend get up on her soapbox and talk about mass incarceration and disproportionate -- in certain communities. these days that is some motivation for young people doing this work but what i really like about the book is the question you just asked, it's the stories about actual people that we represent. angela hines tells a wonderful story about a juvenile in a hopeless case where the juvenile has a long record of juvenile offenses and he is going to get what they called juvenile life. she is trying to come up with some creative defense. he is in the adult jurisdiction so she tries to use a provision with no record in the interest of justice. the judge doesn't buy that and he is convicted again and she

tells the story about losing and her client being sent away to an institution. she goes in the bathroom in christ and comes out of the stall to her client's mother comforts her. it's okay. it's going to be okay. i think it's true of offenders. we take it to heart. i think you have to take it to heart to do this work. you have to have the personality that is open enough to be able to reach out and relate to or connect with other people matter what. i like the bathroom story. we have all been there. >> guest: you fight hard for someone they know it and they think you and it's just a beautiful thing about the work we do. we don't win all the time so having a client who understands how hard you work on their behalf is so rewarding.

>> host: when i heard that story it brought me back not as a defense attorney but as a former prosecutor because the first capital punishment case that i did not try but wanted to watch the closing arguments. during that time the defense attorney was talking because this was a pretrial i was talking and saying during the first trial when they came back with the sentence of death for his client, he couldn't keep it together so you just broke down in court and cried. his client laughed at that particular moment. fast-forward for the retrial, the client this time was the one who is actually speaking for his life and he told that story. he was saying obviously how much he had changed but he also gave their respective knowing how much his public defender had done for him and it was that emotional.

sometimes it's more emotional for the attorney then it is in that moment of time for the client. >> guest: a lot of us have stories of our clients comfort in us. people don't get that. that's not the picture they have of people accused of a crime. >> guest: i tell a story of the a client i visited on death row. he always brought us candy. every time we would go visit because he knew it took us hours to get there. we were driving to parchment mississippi and i'm sure it was an enormous cost to him the prison wages being what they are to buy commissary candy and give it to us. it was just so sweet. this is a man convicted of murder. >> host: what are some of the lessons that you have learned from representing clients? i know there are tone of them

but some of them that come to mind? >> guest: angela davis's essay is called there by the grace of god go i. i often stayed -- say to students that i feel lucky to be born in the family i was born into and get the educational opportunities i had. when i'm in a prison and the door clang shut behind me have us feeling that i'm really lucky. i think it teaches a kind of humility. there is another kind of humility that it teaches which is you don't win all the time. you can be a gracious loser i suppose. there is a kind of -- it's humbling because no matter how skilled you are or diverted the water there is a randomness to justice that sometimes shakes you in your soul. i think that is the other thing.

i learned that all the time, how difficult and challenging the work is and how random justice is, the kind of smallness of the role that we sometimes play. criminal trial lawyers have the personalities. grandiosity is probably an occupational hazard but i think it's humbling in lots of ways. one of the reasons i feel so privileged to the work and our students get this in the clinic right away is what a privilege it is to be invited into another person's life at their very worst moment. they let us in and they let us try to help. that's really rewarding and i have learned a whole lot about myself in that process. >> guest: i think there are a lot of lawyers who go into corporate law and are toiling

away but when you have an actual client that you represent it makes so much easier to put in those long hours and fight on their behalf. i think some of the other lessons that this work has come to show me is these mandatory minimum sentences and incredibly long maximum sentences and would have told those are taking. seeing that r. crumb justice system is basically become a system of -- rather than trials. 95% of cases are resolved by a plea and that is due to these incredibly punitive maximum sentences that are incredibly mandatory minimums sentences in it addition to bail statutes where people are presumed innocent and they are often detained trying to trial. that exacts the toll so innocent people plead guilty just to get

back to their families and back to their jobs. d.c. doesn't have the dell statute so doing this work in seeing what it's like is really eye-opening. >> guest: there's this great scene in the classic movie and justice for all and which al pacino playing the criminal defense lawyer says to a less uncaring colleague, these are people. they are just people. i love that scene because i often feel they are people. they are people like anybody. some are incredibly smart and creative and gifted and some have great leadership skills. other people have been kind of tossed around in life but they are really just people. present company excluded there are fewer of my clients that i have disliked than prosecutors for example. they are just people. that's something to remember and unfortunately we don't think of

that. in this culture for some reason we think we are about to become a thick tongue. until someone close of those gifts to us arrested for something they did or didn't do a of code might god it's a mistake. people make mistakes and they are just like us. >> host: the book brought back so many things for me to think about but as a former prosecutor i have not represented a lot of of -- and one that i did i told you earlier i representative the gentleman who was accused and ultimately did plead guilty to a sex offense charge against two young girls that were very young but when i took on the case in the family wanted me to take on the case and for some reason i couldn't convince them that i didn't think i was the person to take on the case but they kept coming back to me and i did. i had a different point of view with him when i came into the case based on my bias.

i will admit is a former prosecutor but by the end of the day the case went to the system longer than usual but by the end of the day when i was standing up there with him, he was being sentenced, i had learned so much from him. it seems very simple and very trite but people are people and they do make a stakes. that is one of the things that does come out in this vote. >> guest: how were you able to learn that? you've got to know him as a human being? >> host: i got to know him and i got to know his family. the things you talk about in your book. i got to know his family and his sisters. one was a schoolteacher and i think the other one was a schoolteacher. he was in the punitive system in baltimore. he wasn't on a note they'll

status but it comes down to you got some money but do we really want to get you out or do you want to pay an attorney? you don't have money for both. visiting with him and talking with him and talking with his employer to basic told the court he would take them back to work if the court did not give him a sentence, yeah i got to learn by talking to other people and finding out there was a back story. he had been working at the same job for 10 or 12 years. i don't recall what the joke was that he was working at the same job. he was an assistant and they knew what he did. he still would have taken him back. those are basically the things you were talking about in the book and showing their humanity and the other side of the story. ..

>> the client becomes a bigger figure. it seems that you just stand with that in terrible one dash terrible injustice but that that could beat it also >> the garett is one i don't remember the author's name but with guantanamo bay the whole islamic how has 9/11

change what is going on for the backdrop? with all those emotions one could possibly feel? >> i agree. i love the peace it is part about the politics there was the time during the new deal that you said we recognize that people sometimes make mistakes hall a&e you have to you'd discharge your debt to society but that is said

and you should read make your life in and try again. there was a time he attributes first to the dixon administration the more fiercely through the reagan administration that we write off people and we wanted them to be from i s but he talks about the post 9/11 criminal-justice environment those people that we should be most afraid of, it is peculiar forever with no end in sight most are not any through a

tribunal. but my personal story about the client that you meet he tells it will because in order to relate to this particular client he moved to australia and got married and raise children like many people may be to explore moving back to a religious country like afghanistan and then got swept up with a bunch of arrest and taken a and tortured and then it turns out he was innocent

but what it was like it got a happy ending but most of those stories do not. >> i love this story because it did have an unhappy ending that they could resume the life of their family but they are still sitting there. is there really true justice whether there isn't enough resources that they need to

adequately represent behalf were like george silberman can have money collected online therefore he could at abt animations done and expert that they could do how does money play a role? >> it was a huge advantage for the defense talk about mentally ill people, with those resources then there is a crisis of the public defender of this woefully underfunded.

looking of 400 cases at the time they possibly can not know the facts of all pillowcases that. >> those cases. that there is a guideline how many should carry but most offices do not meet that standard. it would be hard to imagine the lawyer has six hours under those standards if you think all the things you want your lawyer to do to investigate the case and interview the quiet multiple times and then to file the motion and edward advocate that is a huge problem that

i think should scare people. of but the sequester has a people don't realize it is the exemplary. they are loyal the -- the laying of lawyers and taking more cases than they can properly handle and that is shameful. >> the department of justice those you don't know the u.s. attorney's office seems to important so they are not under sequester but meanwhile those across the

country where i used to work with the number of fantastic lawyers, these are the people they go against and what cuts the budget and resources and is pretty embarrassing so that needs to be rectified before there is a huge jolt to defendants and then to appoint the attorneys that they cost more than public defenders in terms of the amount of money spent her case. >> they think we don't care for criminal defendants and we do care there is a fair fight and the system seems fair and it should not work better for somebody who has money or somebody who happens to be bored. there is a growing divide

but to the fairness parts i think should matter more than it does. >> host: and there really doesn't and that is the point i did not know about the sequester being equally applied so there is more prosecutions brought against people but less funds to defend against them. clearly it is something wrong with that. you touched a little bit on and mentally ill. there is a definite issue their problems and represent those just as being incompetent or mentally ill in the eyes of the law but those that have personality disorders where the law does not recognize them because the law says you have choices. had you had what about those

developmental challenges the? index this is an area with law enforcement those that are clearly delusional and the person is prosecuted in this is something we routinely seek with the status crimes the mentally ill people and then get the order to stay away because they don't understand then they go back to and we see that all the time. there are five times more people in mental health institutions and that is what we need to focus on. >> case in virginia this was

about two or three years ago and he was not this -- sadistic a form of mass murders and was reading retain the outside to go into the library. because that is what he did every day and for whatever reason it was a holiday he could not go since he does not know that so he just sits there african-american probably larger in size because he does have mental challenges they tried to solicit information why are you hanging around? he goes ballistic in the words of the law he assaults the police officer but they could not get any resolution

so he is in jail. he can fit within that category -- category to be adjudicated city is just now in jail for assaulting a police officer in clearly those are the cases we need to use fly more resources because he did not understand when the police officer touched him on the shoulder what that meant to him. the fairness of the system for a prosecutor but you have to be a moron needs to know that it is not fair. really. what are some of the other challenges to get a fair trial for your client. >> guest: that is a really good question.

we need a fair fight on both sides that would be an important source. fact is a big question that i think there is a lot of different things we need to do. >> host: i agree that people learn not paying attention that if you're not outraged then you are not paying attention one of the first things is when they spent time in the criminal courthouse in terms of race or class like you never see a white person because every once in awhile a person involved with drugs but it does not reflect the demographic there is something wrong with that but likewise