In the past few years, public defense organizations in New York have lost hundreds of staffers. This is because public defenders make around $74,000. Prosecutors make $10,000 more on average, while Evil Lawyers (kidding gawd) make starting salaries of $200,000. The rate paid to assigned counsel hasn’t changed in 18 years, reports the Hill. In that time the hourly rate paid to attorneys in federal court has been raised 14 times.

“As I’ve said many times before in many different contexts, a budget is a reflection of values, and when funding caters to one side of the system and ignores the other, there’s a values problem,’ Tina Luongo, chief attorney of the criminal defense practice at the Legal Aid Society, wrote in the Daily News this summer.

Luongo writes that Legal Aid has more than 100 vacancies. “Each week, I loathe opening my email to receive another notice from a valued team member who is moving on because the work is unsustainable,” she adds.

The ones who remain have bigger caseloads and so their indigent clients wait and suffer and why’s Rikers overcrowded again?

Public defender Victoria Ruiz is one of the ones who stayed at New York County Defender Services. Over the course of her three years there, she’s represented hundreds of indigent defendants. But, well, her clients are going to have to figure something else out.

Ruiz was forced to resign—under threat of termination—after video purporting to show her tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis went viral, with the help of the New York Post, which wrote at least 5 stories about her. One expose revealed that in her off-time, she fronts a punk band! “In addition to her job defending financially strapped Manhattan suspects, the controversial lawyer fronts The Downtown Boys, a five-piece punk outfit with a horn section that Rolling Stone once called “America’s most exciting punk band.”

The story was picked up by the Hill, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and others.

Today Ruiz posted her resignation letter and explained her side of the story.

Last week, I attended a vigil to mourn the lives of the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been killed over this past month. As the vigil was going on and people were reading names of those who have died, a group of agitators arrived and began heckling those of us mourning. The person who took the video of me was among that group. The group began putting up posters around the vigil. I saw that one of the posters had handwritten statements justifying the bombing of Palestinian civilians — the same people whose deaths we were there to mourn.

She says she moved to take down the poster with the disrespectful language and a member of the group began filming her.

Do I have any way to verify her story? No. Is it possible that someone had written something stupid on a poster and that’s why she took it down? Yes, highly plausible, probable even. In other cases people caught on video claw multiple posters down and you clearly see that they’re just posters of the kidnapped civilians. In the video Ruiz removes just the one, not the other one stuck to the lamp post, and walks away. At any rate, there is certainly no definitive proof that Ruiz ripped down a poster just because it featured a kidnapped Israeli civilian.

She continued, “I reject anti-semitism, and I take very seriously the troubling rise in anti-semitism and Islamophobia in recent weeks,” she added. “I also mourn the tremendous loss of all innocent lives and would never seek to disparage and devalue any human lives, including the lives of Israeli civilians.” Ruiz says she tried to engage with the leadership of NYCDS and they rebuffed her, choosing, instead to give quotes to the NY Post without consulting her.

In recent days, the group that filmed her, StopAntisemites, has posted daily videos of people that appear to tear down posters and then helped dox them, demanding they be fired.

What are you doing? Taking down a poster—especially in Ruiz’s case—is not a reason to get someone fired. But sure, I’m certain the next poor person that has to spend months at Rikers because of the deficit of public defenders will support your righteous online doxxing cause.

Congratulations. You got a public defender fired.

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