A rule requiring poor criminal defendants to have a lawyer throughout the criminal process took effect Saturday.
Mississippi Courts Won’t Say How They Provide Lawyers for Poor Clients
Six years ago, the Mississippi Supreme Court told judges around the state to file plans showing how they meet their obligations to poor defendants. So far, only one has.
This Mississippi Court Appoints Lawyers for Just 1 in 5 Defendants Before Indictment
Mississippi is known as one of the worst states for public defense. In one lower court, most defendants went without any lawyer before indictment.
Mississippi Makes Move Toward State-Funded Public Defenders
Indigent felony defendants in many counties have lacked court-appointed lawyers before indictment, even while they sat in jails for weeks or months.
Why Mississippi Courts Must Produce Public Defense Plans
The state Supreme Court wants to know how local courts provide lawyers, if any, to poor people after their arrest.
Mississippi public defender system varies widely by county, court plans show
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment requires states to provide lawyers to criminal defendants who cannot afford one. Mississippi delegates that responsibility to counties, a system civil rights attorneys say is inconsistent and ineffective.
Adequate indigent defense should be a top priority
This past weekend, I published a story for The Commonwealth assessing Mississippi’s 23 circuit court districts’ indigent defense plans — that is how each of those courts provides lawyers to indigent, or poor, criminal defendants charged with a felony who can’t afford their own counsel.
Mississippi public defenders could curb incarcerations - Mississippi Today
What Mississippi needs is a state-level public defender mandate establishing clear, enforceable standards that apply in every jurisdiction: standards for compensation and expenses, for workload, for when counsel first meets a client, for continuity of representation through all stages of a case.
Watch These Judges Rip Into Lawyers For Citing Cases That Don't Exist
“It's striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening to think that members of the bar would forward cases to a court that don't exist, and to think that the lawyers on the other side of that didn’t read it for whatever reason, didn’t check it.”
Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case
When two AIs argue against each other, the legal system loses.
Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’
The law firms involved must pay $31,000.
Why Elite White-Collar Criminals Are Rarely Punished
White-collar criminals benefit from institutionalized non-enforcement practices, regulatory policies, and legal representation not available to street criminals.
Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting
Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment afterward without it. All work was scored by blinded expert patent attorneys. Paralleling findings from other white-collar domains, AI access raised the quality of work delivered on benchmark patent drafting tasks at 10 days (0.34 SD, p = 0.03) and 90 days (0.38 SD, p = 0.01), with larger gains among junior lawyers. After three months, all subjects redlined an existing patent application without AI, a core task of patent practice requiring expert judgment. Treated lawyers outperformed controls by 0.32 SD (p = 0.04), but this advantage was concentrated entirely among senior lawyers (0.45 SD, p = 0.02). Junior lawyers showed no average gain; their scores instead bifurcated, with sharply fewer mediocre scores offset by more poor and more good ones. The largest gains from AI thus accrued to the lawyers who retained the least. Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice.
Hinds public defender: Office needs additional funding to avert constitutional crisis - Mississippi Today
Hinds County public defender says supervisors should approve a funding increase to honor the constitutional promise that justice does not depend on wealth.
Lawyer fined $5K over AI-hallucinated witnesses in a murder case
Another lawyer was caught using ChatGPT in a legal brief.
Editor's Notes: Can We Defy Courts While Believing In Rule of Law?
Do our tactics throw out democracy and rule of law while purportedly aiming at saving them?
The Fiduciary Obligation
ROBERT FLANNIGAN; The Fiduciary Obligation, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3, 1 October 1989, Pages 285–322, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls
