In Germany, between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Nazi regime, a criminal defense lawyer named Max Hirschberg confronted right-wing reactionaries in court, including one Adolf Hitler in a dramatic case in 1929. Some three years later, at the end of 1932, just months before Hitler came to power, Hirschberg published an article in a small democratic journal. He protested the recent misuse of emergency decrees for stripping defendants of certain basic rights. The excuse, Hirschberg pointed out, was budget constraints.
Today in the United States, the federal sequester, the across-the-board cuts in federal spending that took effect March 1, has become a frontal assault on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. For years I have been representing defendants as an employee of Federal Defenders of New York, Inc., the public defender office in New York City for those who cannot afford an attorney. But my office, like its counterparts elsewhere, is being gnawed to the bone in the jaws of the sequester.
