Access to The Champion archive is one of many exclusive member benefits. It’s normally restricted to just NACDL members. However, this content, and others like it, is available to everyone in order to educate the public on why criminal justice reform is a necessity.
A year ago, I attended the 70th birthday party of a former NACDL Board Member. Many of the guests were his colleagues in another smaller, selective organization of generally affluent criminal defense lawyers. Some of them were once active NACDL members. I asked one why he was no longer active in NACDL. He said we had become an organization controlled by and dedicated primarily to the issues of public defenders.
A week later, I read a report by our Indigent Defense Committee that included a survey of public defenders' views of NACDL. One public defender responded that we are an organization controlled by and dedicated primarily to the issues of white-collar defense attorneys.
Both generalizations are wrong!
We are a robust mix of all types of criminal defense lawyers. NACDL is comprised of specialists in legal areas as diverse as the death penalty and DWI.
We are the representatives of all criminal defense attorneys and the advocates for all issues of importance to criminal defense attorneys.
There is a vast commonality of interests between the public defender and white-collar bars. We are all concerned with the erosion of the constitutional right to counsel. The failure of state and local governments to provide sufficient funding so that indigent defenders can adequately represent their clients is just the other side of the coin from governmental pre-trial seizure of assets so that a white-collar attorney cannot adequately defend her client.
We are all concerned with the deterioration of the protection against unreasonable searches, the gradual erosion of the right to reasonable bail, the frequent rewriting of procedural and evidentiary laws to favor the prosecution, the constant ratcheting up of sentences, the transfer of the sentencing power from judges to grids, and the horrendous conditions of our prisons.
Impact on one today and another tomorrow
Issues that impact on one segment of our bar today will impact on another one tomorrow. About 15 years ago, I had lunch with a prominent, successful, white-collar criminal defense attorney. I tried to get him to join NACDL. He said that NACDL issues were not his. I argued that many of our issues were the same and that others that we were fighting at the time would be important to him later. I cited our fight against government forfeiture of our fees in narcotics cases and said, if we lost, in a few years the government would be seizing fees in white-collar cases. He disagreed, and he did not join us. Several years later, a federal court denied his request for trial fees from funds of a high-profile client that had been seized by the government prior to trial.
We are in a time of crisis.
The government seeks — under the guise of war powers — to suspend rights as basic as access to courts for those imprisoned. We cannot afford to dilute our effort.
Public defender and white-collar lawyers, single practitioners and big firm attorneys, we must be united. We are one bar — the criminal defense bar.
