Conflicted Justice

Following a six-month investigation, Alan Maimon of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports on the "conflict system" in Clark County, Nev., in which private attorneys are assigned to poor defendants whom the public defender's office cannot represent due to conflicts of interest. An examination of every case the 30 contract defenders took to felony court in a recent 12-month period showed that the system suffers from a severe lack of standards and oversight that yield uneven justice and questionable government spending. In response to the newspaper's findings, a committee of judges has proposed dramatically overhauling the system. The entire series package can be viewed here.