Another guest, this time from out West

Skelly here, posting from a wind-swept, high desert public defenders office on the cracked rim of the Great Basin. Ken invited a few of us to crash here at Crim Law while he's out of town, but we have to be nice and pick up after ourselves before he gets back. Thank you, Ken.

My contribution seems to be to highlight the foibles and misadventures of my brother and sister p.d.'s. You know all about p.d.s failing to stress to a death penalty jury in the penalty phase that their client is mentally retarded, or simply sleeping on the job. At the moment, the most notorious (ex) public defender has to be Theresa Olson, the attorney who is in the process of having her bar license suspended for having sex with her murder client in the attorney visiting room of the jail. This week a hearing officer determined that an August 10, 2002 tryst between Olson and triple convicted murderer Glen Sebastian Burns was in fact not a "hug gone bad, but "inappropriate, intimate physical contact, including sexual relations, with her client."

Her attorney, doing the good defense attorney thing, pointed out that the hearing examiner had not specifically found that Olson had had "sexual intercourse" but merely "sexual relations" with Burns and that Olson's character and reputation as an attorney were good.

Earlier, King County Public Defender Anne Harper testified that the incident between Olson and Burns "trashed" the reputation of all public defenders. Harper said she feels strongly about the public defense system and its constitutional importance, and that the incident between Olson and Burns especially hurt the reputation of female public defenders.

I guess I come down harder on the individual p.d.'s who make all of us p.d.'s collectively look bad, than on the prosecutors or D.A.'s who play stupid human tricks on our clients. I expect better, and 99.9% of my colleagues do too.