a public defender

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Normally, I don’t watch Court TV. My impression of Court TV has been colored by my opinion of Nancy Grace. So when I stumbled upon the blog of Jami Floyd, a Court TV newscaster, I expected the same vitriol toward defendants and defense attorneys.

Not so. The first clue was this statement at the end of a recent post:

Not exactly efficient.  Florida is just one of 39 states that have the death penalty — 39 examples (40, if you count the feds) of a system that doesn’t work.

Huh. Okay….that could mean a lot of things…so let’s scroll further down. Which is what I did when I came across this entry. This is a clip of something called “The Last Word”.

In this video, she makes a final statement; something akin to when Jerry Springer sits on the stool at the end of every episode and spews wisdom at us through the TV.

In this clip, she was responding to a number of e-mails she had received criticizing the defense attorneys that represented John Couey. She says they always get those e-mails.

She then says some very smart things:

“Those who complain are missing the point, because it’s not about the client but the client’s right to counsel and a fair trial… because his rights are our rights. If you love this country, you’ve read the Constitution and if you’ve read the Constitution, you know defending the accused is the most sacred role a lawyer can play.”

What she has done in those two sentences is sum up my two most frequent responses to the question: “How can you defend those people?”. The Constitution and the reality that not much separates “us” from “them”. Color me impressed.

ps: I just discovered that the video might not work from the page linked to above. If it does not, go to the main page and scroll down till you find the entry. It is on March 13 at 3:52pm.