trial on television. i couldn't do it. i don't think i had the patience for it and i was so dreading the outcome that i couldn't watch it. i feel like as i've gotten oldee anymore. i will go on wikipedia and look up the plot of different books just so i can read it beforehand and i don't have to be surprised. i couldn't handle watching the trial on television. i was sort of following the trial in some ways on twitter. when i saw the verdict, i was just stunned and of course immediately i thought about my brother. and i began thinking about my brother and how, you know thinking about the message that

verdict, the message that it conveys. i feel like we got the same message in what happened with my brother. i feel like the messages, your life is worth nothing. and so you know, when i was thinking about how do i respond to this, i thought the only way that i could respond to it is first by acknowledging that message and putting it out there that this is the message. this is what is being communicated here. but then also after saying okay, this is the message then i felt like okay this is the message you are giving me in this verdict but this is what i'm going to say to you and what i'm going to say to you is i am a human being and he was a human being and he had dignity and yet worth and is life was worth

everything. i feel like just by me speaking and just by making that assertion, that does something. that in a way that allows me to assert that i'm a human being and i am worth the update mentee and my brother was a human being and his life was is worth something. so that was my initial response to the trayvon martin case. you know i mean, i want to say that. that was my reply on twitter and a couple of different articles i wrote afterward. i wanted to state that fact because i think it's important for another message to be out there for people to hear another message. i want people to hear actually

you are everything and you should speak up and assert that you are everything because sometimes that's all we can do, you know and it's worth something. well, thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

gideon versus wainwright and my initial idea was to go out and take the temperature across the country, to see how this issue of the right to counsel has played out in the last 50 years since that landmark decision. so, i found there's a huge huge crisis in the courts, the public defenders are grossly overworked some of the public defenders i talk who are carrying as many as 700 cases at a time. so what i tried to do in the book was to write a book about

this crisis in the court. it's a book that was written for general readers, not lawyers because one of the driving questions in my book was, how can everybody that is involved in the court system, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, cops already nine set the system is broken, that there's this huge crisis and not do anything? so i went in with that ashton and the answer that i walked out with is that most people outside of the judicial system don't know about these problems. so i wrote "chasing gideon" for those people who are ingested in justice and fairness but don't know the intricacies of our united states court system. i tried to tell the story narratively so that it's interesting to people and so that you see what it's like to go through the courts from a

client's gift. i talk about an 18-year-old who was in a car accident and charged with the aqi manslaughter. i talk about a 12-year-old who accused of sexual assault because he played with the neighbor boy. allegedly. and i talk about a death penalty case and other cases like that. i try to tell the story through the perspective of those clients and what it's like for them and how important a lawyer's role is because the court system can be very overwhelming when you look at it and when you walk into any court in the country and you will see rows and rows and rows of people sitting on benches or is ending in the hallways, who are meeting their lawyers for the first time on the fly, don't know their names. they thrust out their hand and they spell out the story in five

minutes and then they asked this person to go to court and defend them. and this person is juggling so many cases he can't really dedicate the time that they need to give justice to this persons case. i wanted to tell that story in "chasing gideon" and just to focus our nation's attention on that 50 years after the supreme court decision. >> what is the core reason for the system being broken? is it simply a matter of not enough money or is it a matter of there not being enough interest i qualified attorneys to do this kind of work or some kind of combination, something else? >> i think it's a combination of things. there are several systemic rob lands. there is a culture in the courts where sometimes some public defender is a sort of a bravado

about like how much work can you do without complaining so the culture of the courts can fuel that especially also among judges who have an attitude of move the cases along, and clear the docket and let's keep going, keep the calendar clear. so it is -- so there is that culture and then there is big financial problems and financial disincentives. there is often not enough public defenders so their caseloads get too high so that's another huge problem. and then there is also a problem with the way that public defenders are paid in many states. for example out of shinki in state one of cases that i wrote about there, they have these things called contract attorneys. and they are paid a flat fee contract.

for every client that gets gets sent their way in a particular county. all of their experts who are investigators are any of that, the fees have to come out of their own flat fee contract. so there's a disincentive sometimes to do good work, so there's a lot of different pressure points in the system right now but i think the biggest problem is the general public doesn't realize that and it's a hard sell to the public the cause all the people ever hear from politicians are kind of you know lock them up and throw away the key, three strikes you're out. they really are fearful of getting a lot did by talking about any of these issues are showing the least bit of fairness or empathy for these people that are going through the system. so i think there has to be a cultural shift