#and that shouldnt been seen as some kind of moral failing

[bloodybellycomb]

"Red white and royal blue is too cringy" "heartstopper is too unrealistic" yeah maybe but so is every single other rom com under the sun. Why does queer media always need to be realistic and profound while straight stories get more freedom to be silly and fantastical?

[meggannn]

Thoughts and analysis on Gen. Armstrong (if you don't mind)

oh absolutely. a lot of this is speculation on my part, but it’s just my reading and theories on how she kind of came to be who she is.

so i vibe with armstrongs being a very traditional, patriarchal family in a very old-fashioned country. they had four daughters, olivier being the oldest and (arguably) most capable, but alex, the second youngest kid but only son, was the one chosen to lead the family. i think that olivier carried a lot of the burdens of being the oldest sibling and oldest daughter.

maybe olivier was the first daughter in the armstrong family in a long list of sons? i like that idea because it kind of has the opportunity harden her to the world as a kid, in my mind. a lot of excitement for the firstborn in an illustrious family, and… it’s a girl. ugh. okay, well, we’ll try again.

except i think olivier really decided to just start doing whatever she thought a male firstborn would get to do, taking her studies seriously, preparing to be the armstrong heir, and her family just kinda sighed and didn’t take her seriously. when she joins the military, i am going to bet that she either had to fight for it, or there was a lot of familial backlash/tsking between her parents because ~a woman shouldnt be in the army~ (i am operating under the belief she’s the only female officer to ever make it to general, because to my recollection i don’t think we’ve ever seen another female officer as high or higher than her). and when alex follows her to the military years later, i’m going to bet she was L I V I D when their parents were like “well of course, he’s the oldest son, he’s going to make us proud.” there were screaming matches of epic proportions when she joined, and when he does, it’s all fine. (even alex as an adult isn’t entirely rid of sexism when he asks when she’s ever gonna change her attitude so she can get a husband. and when she challenges his right to head the family, he arguably loses because he underestimated her. although i’m also going to chalk part of that up to the fact that although alex wanted to head the family, he didn’t NEED to win as badly as olivier needed to, because she needed to kick their family out and use the mansion to house her troops to prepare for the promised day. that’s the kind of person she is, “i need this to happen and so it will happen, i will give myself no other option.”)

i don’t think that olivier is the kind of person who pushes her limits to try to “prove” anything to other people; maybe she started by trying to mostly prove it to herself, but it eventually just became who she is. no nonsense. very protective, but maybe tired of taking care of kids/siblings. highly capable, very savvy. perfect for briggs. i think she takes her role as their leader VERY seriously. she knows she’s earned it, and up north defending the border, she sees how every person matters.

i’ve always wondered if there’s something in how olivier is stationed at briggs, the furthest possible post away from central. i don’t think it’s to get away from anything, exactly; it does seem like the best job suited for her. i think partly this represents her physical distance and distain for politics: she clearly looks down on mustang, possibly because he’s a state alchemist, and maybe part of it is for his reputation of being an annoying flirt who can charm his way up the ranks while maybe she had to fight for every rank she earned, though i think also part of it is because she thinks he’s naive to join the very system he’s trying to abolish. but as we see in late show, she’s not terrible at the politics and backstabbing, i think she just doesn’t like to deal with bullshit. she’s a very blunt person. she’ll play chess if she has to, clearly, but when she pulls the sword on the room full of officers, you know she’s been waiting MONTHS to do that.

she also doesn’t like alchemy. i’ve always wondered if there’s a reason behind this – the wiki says “she views [equivalent exchange] as a mindset promoting easy handouts and unnecessary compromise” so i’m guessing she doesnt like philosophies that base themselves around quid pro quo agreements, especially since it leads very easily to corruption. the armstrongs are a very noble family that take that sort of thing seriously. i think she’s smart enough to realize alchemy is often NECESSARY, but the state alchemists themselves are… ugh. difficult to deal with and probably almost always really bossy. and think they’re so fuckin special. and also all male. so it’s no wonder she doesn’t give a shit about edward elric, some kid who shows up with no warning with a letter from her annoying brother, asking for her help.

so already she has a chip on her shoulder about alex: he’s a younger sibling she had to take care of; he’s a younger BROTHER who got more support and fewer roadblocks than she did for achieving (or even wanting) the same things way before he ever did; he’s also an alchemist, and state alchemist. she’d see that as annoying at best and borderline dishonorable at worst.

and then ishval.

so for the record, i fully believe that by the events of canon, olivier’s intense disgust for alex for his “cowardly” actions in ishval is mostly, if not entirely, an act. i think it’s EASY for her to act like it’s real, because she struggles with real feelings of hostility and annoyance toward alex for the reasons above, and she WOULD probably think he’s a poor soldier for defying orders…… but would she openly advocate for genocide? she’s not perfect, but i don’t think that of her. but she lets absolutely none of that internal questioning show on the outside. externally? “my brother is a disgrace. he failed to protect this country. if i were head of the family, i’d dishonor him publicly.” and alex, you know, i think he sees past this, a little? he knows she has to say these things otherwise she’d lose her reputation and might also be demoted, given she’s on a rickety foundation as a woman general as is. she doesn’t have to be so passionate about her opinions, but she might also have gained a target on her back by his actions in ishval; maybe they’d assume she had ishvallan sympathies because he was her brother. so she’s already got enough baggage against alex, and he inadvertently dumps some more political bullshit on her back just because he didn’t do his job. i think she’d say the things she did to distance herself from alex, not because she’s angry with him or disappointed in him (though there is a bit of that, but for unrelated reasons), to keep her position. she’s very ruthless politically. you could question the morality of this, like i do, but i don’t entirely blame her for feeling like she could lose her position as the only female general in charge of defending a politically hot border position.

fma has a rather annoying “we don’t see color” attitude wrt race at times, but in the case of olivier, whose attitude after all the years in briggs is “we literally cannot afford to be prejucide, there are so few capable people here, and if someone works, they are part of the team and will be treated with respect, full stop” it makes sense why she’d say what she said to miles. it’s not that i think she’s an ishvallan activist behind the scenes because of her lieutenant, but i think she knows the “war” was complete horseshit and fully respects his bitter feelings toward the amestrian government.

privately, though, i think olivier knows clearly that this country is messed up, before “the shape of this country.” but she has a very powerful family, and it’s hard to completely renounce that dedication. she still loves amestris a lot. she feels very protective of the people she’s defending, even if she doesn’t like them very much.

i respect that she swallows her pride, gives up briggs, and joins the political battle in central when it becomes clear that that’s the best way to get to the center of the matter. imo she and roy mustang teaming up, unnoticed, in the heart of the beast could have made an amazing combo, but ofc she’d never let that happen lmao. she is a good person without being a nice person. that’s refreshing. she’s ruthless, pragmatic, ambitious, angry, untrusting, and kind of an asshole, and yet you never doubt that she is, at heart, honorable and trustworthy. she will tell you what she thinks of you. she hates lying. but she will cave and do what the people of amestris needs her to do; we see she IS able to separate her government from her country. i think she always knew, but the events of the show are kind of her “put up or shut up” moment to stand up and show where her loyalties really are, and she delivered. she’d be offended if you ever even thought she might choose differently.

i love olivier a lot because she doesn’t have an arc in the traditional sense; her personality and position don’t change much from the time we meet her to the last time we see her. her biggest change is that she lets herself show pride in her brother, or maybe she’s able to admit that she’s proud of him in the first place. i think for her, that’s enough. i also really, really like that she’s not shown as someone who NEEDS to change. she’s allowed to be an angry, confident, strong woman in charge of a fort who likes things the way she likes them and expects you bend to her rules in her fort or you will leave. i think it’s a great accomplishment and testament to the writing and acting to show that she is not nice, and not always likable, but you never question she is a good person.

[rolandfontana]

Courthouse ‘Warrior’ or Diplomat? The Public Defender’s Challenge

Give The New York Times credit.   When it comes to exposing our indigent defense crisis, the paper keeps at it.

Last month, reporters Richard Oppell, Jr. and Jugal Patel produced a story that introduced readers to a public defender in Louisiana with a list of pending cases long enough to require five years’ work, and to bewildered indigent clients in Rhode Island who received one to five minutes of defender counseling at their first court appearance.

The Oppell and Patel survey was given prominent placement.  The Times digital edition deployed interactive features.  Photographs of 113 of one defender’s 194 clients were published to give human faces to the numbers.  It was a serious piece.

Still, while I don’t enjoy saying this, I’ve been doing public defender work for 45 years, and I have read variations of this story 200 times.  The caseload count is worse now in many places than it was in the mid-1970s when I first got involved.

I’m not sure this story—and the legion of stories like it— will make a difference on their own.

The impact of straightforward case counts is unpredictable.  Back in my days as a state public defender in Massachusetts,  I was attacked by a legislator outraged that our state’s too-high (but in the middle-of-the-pack nationally) caseloads were luxuriously low, compared with the desperate situations described in Bob Spangenberg’s pioneering data studies, the precursors of the line of inquiry The Times is now pursuing.

And while we certainly need better time-per-case adequacy standards, the problem isn’t convincing an audience that defenders want more time. People know that by now.

The challenge is communicating what it is that defenders would do with the time.

Some decision-makers have a jaundiced view of public defenders. One legislator told a colleague who was complaining that defenders were paid less than sanitation worker that “the trash men take the garbage off the streets; you guys just put the garbage back out there.”

The defender community’s own infatuation with Herbert Packer’s Battle Model of a criminal process seen as a stylized war—a zero sum conflict between the Crime Control Warrior Cop and the Due Process Warrior Defender—contributes to this situation.

Often, this Battle Model vision is wheeled out as a convenient morale-building shortcut. But it does contain a germ of truth.

In every courthouse where criminal cases are heard, there are damaged or apathetic individuals who have been granted power over the lives of impoverished clients, who enjoy their roles, and who abuse their authority at leisure from positions of complete security.

I’ve represented almost 100 murderers over the years, but only one of them makes his way onto my private roster of The Dozen Worst People.  The remaining eleven places are held by a variety of judges, prosecutors, cops, and other lawyers: racists, sadists, bullies, and liars among them.

It’s true that if you’re not ready to go to war with these people you shouldn’t take a defender job.

But for defenders, as for actual military war-fighters, charge-the-machine-gun-nest courage is an ultimate requirement, more than an immediate one. Having it is necessary, but not sufficient.

It turns out that living humbly in a good cause, not dying gloriously for one, is the actual challenge.

The indispensable personal quality for a defender is resiliency.

That means the capacity to bounce back, the ability to return tomorrow and the next day and summon empathy, to doggedly prepare for battles that will probably never occur, and-—at the risk of sounding insufficiently warlike—to sustain and draw on a reservoir of  patience and kindness toward clients, their families, and their victims.

Thinking about resiliency is important because resiliency is not only a quality in individuals; it is also a crucial property of safe systems.

For better or worse, the criminal courthouse really is a system.  It is not a mechanical system like a clock.  It is not a chaotic eco-system like a swamp.

But it is a complex socio-technical system, like a hospital or an airport.

To begin with, thinking about criminal justice as a system can remind us that this system has an intake valve.  There are simply too many cases. The prosecutors, (according to one quoted by The Times) feel just as overworked as the defenders.

So, stop filing the cases.

As Alexandra Natapoff demonstrates in her brilliant new book Punishment Without Crime, many of them don’t matter, and pursuing them inflicts wide, radiating circles of collateral harm.

Besides, we can learn a lot about the safety of systems under pressure from aviation, medicine, and other fields.

Some systems under pressure break catastrophically:  they are “brittle.”   (Think of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.)

But others are resilient. They adapt and adjust. They innovate in the face of surprises and anomalies.   The recognition of the importance of resiliency illuminates how the new, data-driven approaches to defending can help convey the indispensable value of defenders’ contributions.

Brady wrongful conviction cases fuel the Villain Prosecutor v. Warrior Defender narrative.  But from a system perspective, they raise the question whether an adequately funded defender might have caught the mistake.

Apart from evidence the prosecutors have and knowingly conceal is evidence they didn’t have (and couldn’t easily get) and that the defenders don’t have the time to uncover and provide. There is still other evidence the prosecutors had, but didn’t recognize as exculpatory because the starved defense couldn’t provide the context.

Systems-oriented “sentinel event reviews” of these wrongful convictions could help us understand why particular prosecutors in particular cases zigged when they were supposed to zag.  It would also show us why the defenders in those cases were unable to provide the resiliency that would have avoided tragedy:  how an overwhelming caseload and the absence of investigative capacity influenced the outcome.

A pair of Rand Corporation studies led by James Anderson and Paul Heaton has compiled and interrogated the data about these issues.

The earlier of the two studies, subsequently published in the Yale Law Journal, shows the influence of adequately funded defense in Philadelphia murder cases.

The salaried staff attorney defenders, who handled murder cases in two lawyer teams with access to in-house investigators and forensic science expertise, produced superior outcomes compared with private attorneys, whose fees were capped and who had to scrounge for investigative and forensic expert resources.

The second study assessed defender performance at the other end of the case-seriousness spectrum by examining a “natural experiment” provided by comparing the “holistic” defense approach of the Bronx Defenders with the traditional approach of the New York Legal Aid Society in the high-volume retail processing of criminal cases.

See also: Tom Reed, “Can Public Defenders Be Reformers?”

I won’t attempt to untangle at this point the complex questions of why the outcomes are different. I just want to point out that the style of defending adopted did clearly produce differences, and that the differences were on metrics—e.g., reductions in incarceration and expense, without rises in the re-offense and failure-to-appear rates—that everyone would accept as system goals.

These studies indicate that, given the time to perform it, the defense function not only protects the clients the defenders “champion.”

It bolsters the overall system’s resiliency.

By mobilizing the defenders’ capacity to “stop the line” and fill the information gaps about the client or the case when the police have followed the wrong trail or our shiny new Risk Assessment algorithm has failed to account for an individual feature, the system saved money, protected the community, and preserved just outcomes.

Of course, “stopping the line” on a Friday afternoon when the judge is trying to clear his docket requires a “warrior” equipped to advocate for some local sacrifice (“No golf!!!??”)  in order to reach the larger systems goals of more justice and lower cost.

But those local sacrifices are what a resilient system delivers.

Understanding American criminal justice requires understanding both the searing individual narratives of persons and communities entangled with that system and the statistical vision derived from a careful consideration of the data.  The vision and the narrative are not only complementary, they are mutually dependent.  One is meaningless-—even misleading—without the other.

The Times coverage and the data-based efforts it describes should help us see that system resiliency—and, ultimately, safety—is “emergent.”   It grows out of the individual narratives that only adequately funded defenders can fully develop, and what it grows into is more than the sum of a pile of anecdotes and sob stories.

Resiliency might be required in different ways and at different times by different failures and challenges.

The current realities of our criminal justice world set ostensibly independent silos—cops, courts, defenders, corrections—fighting with each other over scarce resources.

But it would be good to remember that these elements constitute interdependent parts of a larger whole that can, if its parts are adequately funded, provide greater safety for everyone.

James M. Doyle is a Boston defense lawyer and author, and a frequent contributor to The Crime Report. He welcomes readers’ comments.

Courthouse ‘Warrior’ or Diplomat? The Public Defender’s Challenge syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/