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.
Read more
