Name: 布賴恩-史蒂文森談美國司法中的 "平局 (Bryan Stevenson on Evening the Odds in American Justice)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:28:05.000Z
Duration: 29 min 35 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. We lost a great journalist this week.

Anthony Lewis was a longtime reporter and columnist at the “New York Times.” I knew

him during my years in Washington when he made his reputation as our foremost interpreter

of the Supreme Court and the impact of its decisions on civil rights and liberties. As

one legal scholar noted, Lewis had “an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible

This was Tony Lewis’ masterpiece – “Gideon’s Trumpet” – an account of the Supreme Court’s

Gideon v. Wainwright ruling in 1963 that established the constitutional right of criminal defendants

to an attorney, even if they had no money to pay for one. The book has never been out

of print, its’ story the subject of this CBS reports documentary:

MARTIN AGRONSKY ON CBS REPORTS: His name is Clarence Earl Gideon. He argued

there could be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount

of money he has. He argued there should not be one kind of justice for the rich, another

for the poor. Gideon blew one note on his trumpet. He blew it over and over: a man cannot

get a fair trial without a lawyer. And because he would not retreat one wit from that position,

this man, Clarence Gideon, has wrought a profound change in the course of American Jurisprudence.

BILL MOYERS: Gideon was a drifter with a criminal record,

charged with breaking and entering and robbing a pool hall in Florida. Denied representation,

he defended himself and was sentenced to five years in state prison. From his cell, he exercised

his right to petition the Supreme Court for a fair hearing. When the justices ruled In

Gideon’s favor, hundreds of prisoners who also had been denied their legal rights were

freed or given new trials and our current system of public defenders was born.

But fifty years later that system is floundering. When Gideon v. Wainwright was decided, fewer

than half of all defendants were poor. Now, over 80 percent are. Of the 2.2 million inmates

in the United States, more than sixty percent are members of racial and ethnic minorities,

and the law puts a disproportionate number of them on death row.

Bryan Stevenson found his calling defending the poor and least powerful among us. Straight

from Harvard Law School he went south, eventually to create the Equal Justice Initiative in

Alabama, the state with the highest per capita rate of death sentences in the country. He

and his colleagues have battled excessive and unfair sentencing, helped free prisoners

on death row, challenged the abuse of the incarcerated and mentally ill, and stood up

on behalf of minors, children, prosecuted as adults.

BILL MOYERS: That Supreme Court decision, Gideon, 50 years

ago said, you have the right to an attorney in a criminal case, even if you cannot afford

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, it was radical. It was revolutionary.

For decades the poor had really been very vulnerable in our criminal court system and

frequently faced very severe punishments alone. What Gideon did was basically say that our

constitution requires that we treat people equally when their life and when their liberty

is at risk. And it changed the way we thought about counsel for the poor in this country.

At least in theory, at least in doctrine.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I read that there are approximately

15,000 court-appointed defenders representing millions of criminal suspects, defendants,

and inmates all over the country and paid for by the taxpayers. But I also read that

a poor person has a much greater chance of being incarcerated now than when the Supreme

Court handed down that decision. Why is that?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, I think it's because we never really

took the right seriously. You look at some of the Court's major decisions in the '50s

and '60s, Brown v. Board of Education, would not have actually changed education for racial

minorities in this country, had not thousands of people marched and fought and made that

Gideon was the kind of decision that didn't have advocates, didn't have people out there

insisting that enforcement take place right away. It was really left to the discretion

of states and some states took up the challenge and many states didn't. And so today we have

only 24 states that have statewide public defender systems.

We have lots of states that have done very little to make the right to counsel for poor

people effective. And so 50 years after Gideon, sadly, we still have a system that treats

you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth is still

BILL MOYERS: And how have events since then affected our

inability or unwillingness to carry Gideon out?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Everything has been aggravated by mass incarceration.

As you point out in the 1960s, there were 200,000 people in jails, in prisons. The number

of people who were poor facing confinement was a very small percentage, or half. Today,

we have 2.2 million people in jails and prisons, nearly five million people on probation and

And so our appetite for punishment, for incarceration, for condemnation has made the demand, the

need for lawyers much greater than we've been able to comply with, we've been able to meet.

And so I think quite sadly, the situation for poor people in the criminal justice system

is much, much worse today than it was in 1963, largely as a function of numbers.

BILL MOYERS: What's been the impact of the war on drugs?

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, the war on drugs has been probably the

biggest factor in driving the prison population up. You've now basically imprisoned, hundreds

of thousands of people for nonviolent, simple possession of crimes like marijuana, that

result in incarceration. So you've thrown hundreds of thousands of people into the system,

and of course this is these are the cases where you actually need a very smart, informed

BRYAN STEVENSON: Well, because you'll be told that if you plead

guilty, you can go home. You're not told that there will be these collateral consequences.

You might lose your right to vote, you'll be barred from public housing, you won't ever

You'll be building toward this situation where if you get arrested again, you'll be facing

mandatory sentences like 20 years in prison, or life in prison. And all of that stuff has

to come from an advocate who explains the consequences. Yet what we've done with the

system is create a situation where the lawyers themselves have an incentive to plead everybody

out. About 94 percent of all cases in this country are resolved by a plea.

BILL MOYERS: Do judges have an incentive too?

BILL MOYERS: To get a guilty plea instead of a ten-week

BRYAN STEVENSON: Absolutely. I mean, again, by throwing hundreds

of thousands of people into the system by, you know, allowing the politics of fear and

anger to throw hundreds of thousands of people into our courts, court judges, trial judges,

They don't have the space, they don't have the resources, they don't have the facilities

to process in a fair and reasonable way all the cases that are coming in. So they absolutely

want cases settled. They don't want cases going to trial. And a lot of them find lawyers