Current Affairs

Today's guest is Stephen Bright, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the United States. Prof. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and Georgetown Law, but has spent most of his life working as an advocate for poor people accused of serious crimes. During his decades in charge of the Southern Center For Human Rights, he argued multiple times in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and represented defendants some of the most difficult death penalty cases. Today we discuss the status of the right to a lawyer in the United States. Constitutionally, everyone is guaranteed an adequate defense, but in practice, the amount of representation one gets is based on the amount of money one can spend, and public defenders offices vary wildly across the country. Nobody is better familiar with the situation than Prof. Bright, whose writings include:Counsel for the Poor: The Death Penalty Not for the Worst Crime But for the Worst Lawyer (1994)Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance After Gideon v. Wainwright (2013) (w/ Sia S