Understatement

Over at Reason's Hit and Run blog, Radley Balko has a post simply titled "Here's a Bad Idea." He's right. What is the idea? Electing public defenders:

Witness Matt Shirk, a Republican recently elected public defender in Jacksonville, Florida. Shirk, who was backed by the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, has never defended a homicide case. His campaign promises included a vow not to oppose funding cuts to the office he was running for, and a promise to squeeze as much money as possible out of indigent defendants, including a proposal for the postponed billing of acquitted defendants who might later be able to find some employment.

The FoP and the PD should not be friends. Cordial colleagues, OK, but nothing more than that. And the idea of running on a platform of cutting costs in an office that is chronically underfunded is mind boggling.

As prosecutors sometimes do, Shirk is cleaning house in his office, including some mildly famous faces:

As it turns out, several of the fired attorneys Shirk fired worked on the high-profile case of Brenton Butler, a 16-year-old wrongly accused of the robbery and murder of an elderly tourist. The Butler case was a huge embarrassment for Jacksonville’s sheriff’s department. Trial testimony suggested Butler’s confession had been beaten out of him by detectives with the department. Butler’s case eventually became the subject of the Oscar-winning HBO documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning. The sheriff’s department apologized to Butler, and reopened its investigation into the murder.

If you've never seen Murder on a Sunday Morning, get it in your Netflix queue right now. It's an amazing documentary and a real story of the hard fight for justice. I'll have to take another look at it, as it's one of those things that makes me proud to be a PD.