It was accepted by the Supreme Court in the cases decided last week that defendants frequently receive inept advice. It is also frequently the case that the government spuriously seizes the assets of defendants as ill-gotten gains — on the basis of fraudulent affidavits in ex parte actions — so that the defendants can’t engage the counsel of their choice, and then stays those proceedings while the criminal case is decided without the presence of a serious defense counsel.

It is also usually the case that the public defender, provided in response to the much-mythologized Gideon v. Wainwright case of 1963, is an underfunded and docile dupe of the prosecutors, who is paid according to the number of clients he represents and not his performance, thus incentivizing minimal service and maximum turnover. And it is very often also the case that whatever is agreed between the prosecutor and the defense counsel is not followed by prosecutors after the plea is entered, or is ignored by the judges, most of whom are unregenerate ex-prosecutors.

The most rigorous legal scholars could ransack the learned legal journals of this country and find almost no references to, much less expressions of concern about, the fact that in 40 years the number of convictions that are the result of a trial has sharply declined to a pitiful one in 33, while the U.S. has gone from the mid-point of incarcerations per capita among prosperous democracies to six to twelve times as many as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, or the United Kingdom.