TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Katharine Heriges on Aug 14, 2017
An American Bar Association report is claiming that in Nashville, indigent defendants accused of a misdemeanor and facing jail time are not consistently informed of their right to counsel, ProPublica reports. The document, created by the ABA section on civil rights and social justice, was released on Friday, and is based on research conducted by volunteer lawyers in Sept. 2016. It states that this failure by the Metro Nashville justice system is “an extremely serious and pervasive problem that can no longer be ignored or tolerated.” The observations in Nashville are the launch of a larger, national project to review practices in misdemeanor courts in other states throughout the country.