Good morning. Today is Thursday. We will look at public defenders who are leaving their jobs, citing low pay. We’ll also look at one’s quest for new ways to grow seaweed.
“We are not paid what we are worth,” said Javionte Johnson, above, a 27-year-old public defender with Harlem’s Neighborhood Protection Service.
He continued to work, working to see that a fundamental promise of the Constitution was honored – that defendants were innocent until proven guilty. But hundreds of attorneys like Johnson have left New York City’s public defenders in the past year, frustrated by low wages that they say undervalue their work. They complain they’re at a disadvantage in court, at least psychologically: The prosecutors they face can make at least $10,000 more a year.
Legal Aid AssociationNew York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services to upset customers, has lost 10% of its employees, or about 200, in the past 12 months, up 73% from 2021. Among those leaving has 55 public interest defenders who have attempted criminal cases and 37 legal services attorneys who have represented clients in housing and immigration court.
Turnover at other defender organizations is even higher. Over the past year, Brooklyn Defender Services has lost 40 attorneys, or 27% of its employees; and New York County Protective Services lost 30 attorneys, or 24 percent of their staff. The Bronx Defenders have lost 18 attorneys, while the Queens Defenders have lost 17 attorneys.
My colleagues Jonah E. Bromwich writes that the departure has put additional pressure on the lawyers to stay. The concern is that clients will not get the representation they deserve at a time of political pressure on prosecutors and police to check gun crime.
The court system has rapidly settled gun possession cases in recent months. Such cases are often complicated, and public defenders say the faster schedule makes it more difficult to ensure that customers are treated fairly. Lawyers worry that speed could lead to mistakes – which in turn could land their clients in jail for years.
The attorneys also say the accelerated court schedule leaves little time for them to search for evidence that could wipe out their clients or negotiate possible plea agreements with prosecutors.
Diana Nevins, 38, a Queens-based public defender said: “With the courts pressuring and fundamentally assessing the process and effectiveness of their clients’ constitutional rights To me, it just creates this absurd pressure,” said Diana Nevins, 38, a public defender who works in Queens, “and frankly it’s not reasonable.”
While first-year law school graduates at Legal Aid’s criminal practice base earn about $74,000 a year, as much as the attorneys are paid by the city, their salaries are lower than that of prosecutors and city attorney after 5 years.
That has increased the preference for attorneys at legal service providers. Advocacy groups have scheduled protests on Thursday calling for help from city officials, including $10 million for Legal Aid alone.
“Budget is value,” said Tina Luongo, chief criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Association. “If you’re worried about staffing the NYPD and staffing corrections, but you’re not worried about staffing public defenders, then you’ve got a value problem. ”
Weather
Prepare for showers and thunderstorms, then turn to a sunny day near the 80s. The evenings are mostly clear with low temperatures around the 60s.
PARKING OUTSIDE
Valid until June 20 (ie, June 12).
Michael Doall is the Johnny Appleseed of sugar kelp.
Well, in one sentence we compared apples to, um, seaweed. It gets tangled in your toes on the beach. It wraps itself around the propellers on boats, including yours, if you’re lucky enough to have one.
Doall became a marine scientist growing up — a shellfish specialist in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University — and an oyster farmer. And then he discovered sugar kelp.
It’s a native seaweed that captures carbon and removes nitrogen from the water much more efficiently than the denitrifying septic systems needed in the new homes in Suffolk County, where Doall lives. Kelp sugar helps prevent harmful algae blooms.
And those who have eaten it say it’s delicious. Fleshly. Brothy.
Seaweed farming is hardly a bright spot in the US economy compared to Asia, where most of the world’s kelp is grown. But Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill into law last year to clear the way for kelp to enter the increasingly diverse aquaculture sector. This measure has opened up 110,000 acres at the mouth of the Peconic River, on Long Island, to potential seaweed farming.
Our writer Charity Robey says that if seaweed farming is a success in New York, it’s largely because Doall has shown other farmers how to grow it in places no one has ever grown before.
He suspects that kelp will make a good winter that won’t interfere with his warm-weather oyster farming. But he learned that all kelp farming in the US takes place in deep water and involves 10-foot-long tentacles hanging from ropes suspended underwater, swaying freely in the ocean. These are conditions that don’t exist in the knee-deep waters of a Long Island oyster farm.
“Nobody is really trying to grow in shallow water,” he says.
But — with a grant from the New York Institute of Agricultural Capability in 2018 — he found a way. He tested his new method at Paul McCormick’s Cannon Oyster farm in East Moriches.
Since then, Doall has developed seaweed-growing techniques for everything from the shallow, sandy bottom of Moriches Bay to the swift, murky East River. He gave advice and planted on more than 15 commercial sites – all of which are considered experimental, as state regulators are still working out health and safety regulations for farming. seaweed.
The first harvests in the Peconic Estuary areas were a bust. Doall suspects the waters there are too clean. Pollutants like nitrogen tend to be lower there, leaving less nutrients to promote kelp growth. But last month’s harvest on a nearby shallow water farm produced hundreds of pounds of kelp for Sue Wicks, the Hall of Fame basketball player who is pondering the commercial future of kelp.
“In a few years, we will all be considered overnight successes,” she said. “I want to be a part of the future and what kind of food we will eat. And I can do it in the bay where I grew up, where my father grew up and my grandfather and my grandmother. “
METROPOLITAN . Diary
Think
Dear Diary:
After graduating from college, I lived in the East Village. I found a neighborhood barbershop that advertised a $10 haircut and went inside.
A barber, Toufik, led me to his chair with a friendly smile. With our reflections in the mirror, we exchanged stories of our nephews – mine in Baltimore, his in Algiers. He’s a musician, and so am I.
I have become a regular. I learned about the essentials of renting a barber chair as I followed Toufik from shop to store for the next few years.
One day, I went to the barbershop and the barbershop was empty: the door was locked, the barber chair was gone. I have no way of finding out if Toufik is opening a store elsewhere. Finally, I moved out of the vicinity.
