If you catch a public defender in a candid moment, you’ll get a lot of stories like this. What makes the criminal justice system so difficult is that the overwhelming majority of the people that it targets are guilty of what they’re accused of, and scumbags on top of that. When you face that day in and day out, it’s difficult to make yourself keep your eyes open for the innocent ones.

I remember an ACLU email in my inbox about the Juwan Wickware case: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/only-america-1.... It was trying to drum up outrage about a young man who attacked a pizza delivery driver as part of a coordinated robbery. One of the members of Wickware’s party ended up killing the driver in front of his wife and kids (who were in the car). When I dug up details about the case, I thought “you’d think they’d have picked a more sympathetic case to make their point.” But the fact is that those are few and far between.