Poor lack counsel: lawyers cite low pay (Mass.)

By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff, 11/18/2003

Eight-month-old Dwayne F. was swept into a pre-adoptive foster home after his mother suffered an epileptic seizure in court. It was not because she was ruled unfit, but because there was no lawyer willing to take her case for $39 an hour.

After the baby's mother collapsed in Middlesex Family and Probate Court, the judge who was deciding where Dwayne would live gave temporary custody to the state Department of Social Services. By mistake, DSS put the child on the fast track for adoption, an error that wasn't reversed until a lawyer was drafted to represent the baby, three weeks later.

"Where would Dwayne be if I had declined the case?" said attorney Deborah Sirotkin Butler. "People tend to think that assigned counsel only represent scum. But we're also representing children, who are per se indigent. We're all they've got."

With state compensation for so-called bar advocates among the lowest in the country, lawyers across Massachusetts are refusing to take court-appointed cases, leaving poor defendants languishing in jail and parties in tangled custody cases without representation.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2003/11/18/poor_lack_counsel_lawyers_cite_low_pay?mode=PF

Once again, the poor are the first to get shafted by budget cutting pukes like Romney.

and than Blaming the poor for being poor:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/nj-n18.shtml