It started when “James from Webster” called into a WGBH-FM
radio show complaining that his criminal defense lawyer hadn’t called him back.
His call so angered Rollins, a guest on the show, that she
launched into a tirade against public defenders, labeling them “overwhelmingly
privileged.” She said the staff at the Committee for Public Counsel Service claim
they are too overworked and busy to return calls from their poor, Black, and
brown clients.
“When you hear in my voice my disgust and outrage about CPCS
not calling people back — their overwhelmingly privileged staff that aren’t
calling back poor, Black, and brown people because they’re saying they’re
overworked and busy. It’s my people who are losing no matter what. I’m not
going to sit silently on this.”
"I’m not going to let these defendants suffer in
silence because their criminal defense lawyers, who are paid by our tax
dollars, refuse to answer their calls,” she said.
Her comments, on Boston Public Radio Thursday, touched off a
firestorm among defense lawyers, who have been some of her staunchest political
supporters.
The CPCS chief counsel, Anthony J. Benedetti, whose group
provides lawyers to poor defendants, responded with an angry letter the next
day. Her comment, he said, “strikes directly at the heart of our organization.
“These unprovoked attacks on your fellow attorneys did not
go unnoticed, and I am afraid you may have alienated some who believed in your
campaign promises and then found themselves in the crosshairs of an off the
cuff diatribe.”
Rollins was elected in 2018 on a promise of bringing greater
equity to the legal process. She called for reduced prosecution of relatively
minor offenses and denounced structural racism in the court system, winning
admirers among public defenders. But on Jim Braude and Margery Eagan’s show
Thursday, she had little but criticism for public defenders’ work.
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