Chasing Gideon Read Online Free PDF

Anderson would spend a total of at most an hour and a half with A.N.J. and his parents. “He filed no motions. He made no requests for discovery. In fact, he filed no pleadings or documents at all other than his initial notice of appearance,” court documents show. He did not interview any witnesses. He did not hire an investigator. (Money to pay for an investigator would come from the $162,000 flat fee he was paid by Grant County to represent indigentclients. According to a later appellant brief filed by A.N.J’s new attorneys: “In a moment of candor, Mr. Anderson admitted that this financial reality creates a disincentive for him to hire investigators. The strength of the disincentive is revealed by the fact that Mr. Anderson did not hire a single investigator for any one of his 240 juvenile offense cases in 2004. Reverting to a more defensive posture, Mr. Anderson then denied that there was a need to investigate any of those cases.”) Further, “[h]e received the names of two witnesses to contact who would testify that the alleged victim in this case was actually abused by another person rather than A.N.J. Mr. Anderson says that he tried to contact the witnesses by making a telephone call, but he concedes that he ‘was unsuccessful.’ He does not recall whether he even left a message.” And while cases like this, with a five-year-old making the accusation, typically require an expert to carefully conduct interviews without suggestively leading the accuser, ideally recorded for later court use, no expert interviewed the alleged child victim or alleged perpetrator. Anderson declined to consult or hire to testify a single expert. (Again, paying for such a person would come out of his own pocket, according to his flat-fee contract with the county.)
    Instead, Anderson simply suggested that A.N.J. plead guilty. Anderson said in a 2005 deposition, “I do not remember many of the details of [A.N.J.’s] case due to the fact that I have a large caseload,” and further, “I never independently investigated the claims regarding the alleged victim nor did a background check on the family, I simply reviewed the police reports.” He also suggested A.N.J. fudge the truth with the judge. “I told [A.N.J.] that the judge would ask him if he had read [the guilty plea] or if I had explained it to him and to say yes. . . . I spent approximately five minutes with [A.N.J.] going over his statement just before we were called into court.” (Later he recanted, saying that he met with A.N.J.’s parents several times and that during one of the meetings the boy “began to admit to me that he had committed the conduct that was alleged in the police report.”)
    After A.N.J. pleaded guilty before a judge, the boy and his parents learned that his record as a sex offender would never be expunged, that a monitor would likely be assigned to shadow him at school every day from now until he graduated from high school,and he would have to regularly admit his guilt in a therapeutic setting as he attended sex offender group counseling.
    A.N.J.’s parents were shocked. Within weeks they sought out a private attorney who advised them to try and withdraw A.N.J.’s guilty plea based on ineffective assistance of counsel.
    Meanwhile, A.N.J. was sentenced to fifteen to thirty-six weeks in custody, forced to undergo HIV and DNA testing, and required to register as a sex offender.
    The authors of the Constitution Project’s 2009 report Justice Denied : America’s Continuing Neglect of Our Constitutional Right to Counsel back up their assertions about the crushing caseloads public defenders carry with a troubling collection of facts. For example, they noted, in 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in and order Nevada’s Clark County and Washoe County to cut caseloads. Public defenders in the former carried felony and gross misdemeanor caseloads of 364 (more than double the