Reverend Laura Buchanan Ahart | photo by Aditi Mehta
In a stark room at Nashua Street Jail, Reverend Laura Buchanan Ahart is dancing to gospel playing from a clock radio and making preparations for the baptism. On a makeshift pad of old blue tarps, a Jacuzzi-sized Rubbermaid tub is already filled with water. She notices some dust floating on top and asks a guard for chlorine. She’s expecting thirty men.
When they begin to arrive, Reverend Laura is still spraying purple fluid into the pool. She lifts up her bottle, points it at laughing prisoners, and says, “Watch this, I’ll squirt you right here.” They’re wearing uniforms that look like doctors scrubs. They have to change into all-white versions of the same clothes before the baptism can begin. Read more
When Vira Cage first heard the verdict at the trial of her nephew Charles L. Wilhite, she couldn’t believe her ears.
“The fact that the jury came back with, ‘Guilty,’ shook us to the core,” she said of the events of Dec. 6, 2010.
That day, Wilhite was convicted of first-degree murder in the 2008 killing of Alberto Rodriguez in Springfield, Mass.
Forty months later, a Hampden County Superior Court judge overturned the conviction. A key witness in the prosecution had testified to lying when he identified Wilhite as the shooter. Another eyewitness followed suit, and the prosecution’s case fell apart. Read more
For the past eight months, Miriam Conrad has been representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man accused of the Boston Marathon bombings. It may be the highest-profile case of her more than 20-year career as a federal pubic defender. And she’s been doing at least some of the work without being paid.
The reason: Conrad, like the other 18 lawyers at the Federal Public Defender Office for the Districts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, was furloughed as a result of automatic budget cuts known as the sequester.
2013 has been a tough year for the federal public defender’s office in Boston. As the lawyers prepared for what may be their biggest case ever, the defense of Tsarnaev, they faced budget cuts the likes of which the office has never seen. With a new agreement reducing the likelihood of further cuts, the crisis may have eased but the scars remain.
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