Steven Bright sent a letter to the Judicial Nominating Committee expressing serious reservations about Mack Crawford's nomination to replace Johnnie Caldwell, the judge who abruptly resigned from the Superior Court of Spalding County. Two days later, the committee named Mr. Crawford to the short list.
Indigent defense in Georgia is quite frankly an embarrassment. I spoke to a public defender today who is in an awful ethical quandry where he is torn between his ethical duties to his client and the politics of being in this awful system.
I'm not sure how much blame should be put to Mr. Crawford, who has been at the helm of a system that is apparently the red-headed stepchild of the Georgia Republican establishment, other than the fact that he apparently is within that machine. My college roommate and I once contemplated running for president and vice-president of SGA on the platform of "elect us, and we'll abolish SGA." One wonders if similar things aren't afoot in the way the powers that be choose the heads of indigent defense in Georgia.
Having spoken to that commission in the past when I was a Vice-President for GACDL, the whole thing had the dramatic value of a preliminary hearing or a school disciplinary hearing. The ghost of Clarence Darrow wouldn't change the result. It really looked like a serious committee meeting, but it had the feeling of a rubber stamp of a pre-anointed gubernatorial pick. Put more succinctly, I think the fix is in.
Mr. Bright's comments either encouraged Mr. Crawford's selection or they hit the governor and the committee like Charlie Brown's teacher's voice in an episode of The Peanuts.
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