Like many former lawyers, I remember representing
a client whose case embodied such a gross miscarriage of justice that I
now use it as an example to explain the unfairness of the law to
others. My client, whom I’ll call Bobby, was an elderly man with a
recent traumatic brain injury that had left him disabled and unable to
find stable housing. I was working with him to secure a place in
assisted housing and was in contact with him on an almost daily basis.
At some point, though, for about a week, he vanished—no notice, no clue
regarding his whereabouts. He just disappeared.
When Bobby finally arrived back in my office, he told me that he had
been arrested. He had been robbed, and during the robbery his
prescription heart medication was taken. The robbers, presumably after
discovering it was not a drug with street value, threw his prescription
onto the street in front of him. A witness to the attack had called the
police, but when they arrived the robbers were long gone. Bobby,
however, was still at the scene trying to pick up his medicine from the
ground. Bobby was arrested by the officers for possession of
prescription medicine outside of a proper container.
Since the non-profit organization that I worked for couldn’t handle
criminal cases, Bobby was assigned a public defender. He sat in jail for
a few days before meeting with his lawyer, who explained that if Bobby
pled guilty, he would be placed on probation for a year and the charge
would be dropped at the end of that time. Bobby, who wanted to leave
jail as soon as possible, agreed to this and thought that the matter was
resolved.
As Bobby told me this story, I immediately began to worry about his
housing situation. The assisted housing facility would not allow people
who were on probation to reside there. After several calls with his
public defender, I realized that there was not much that could be done.
Bobby, after all, had admitted his guilt in front of a judge and had
waived any rights he had to appeal. So he had to wait a year, living in
substandard housing, before he would be eligible for the assistance he
desperately needed, all because he had made his guilty plea without
understanding the full consequences.
“Defendants don’t know what’s what,” said Dan Canon, author of the new book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class,
when discussing Bobby’s situation with me. “You take a poor or
working-class person that gets swept into the criminal justice system
and is accused of a felony or something like that and the defense
attorney is like, ‘You need to plea…’ and they can’t weigh the strengths
and weaknesses of their case—they can’t tell what’s a good deal and
what’s a bad deal.”
On November 7, 1917 (October 25 by the old Russian calendar), the workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd stormed the Winter Palace and put power in the hands of the revolutionary soviets led by Lenin’s Bolshevik communist party.
The world’s first successful socialist uprising literally changed the world – inaugurating the era of national liberation and socialist revolutions.
The website “All Power to the Soviets,” assembled throughout the revolution’s centenary in 2017, is a great resource on this world historic event that continues to inspire revolutionary workers and oppressed peoples around the world.
Peatlands are unique ecosystems formed of partially-decomposed animal and plant matter which can sequester and store CO2 on a massive scale. The UK has a large proportion of the world’s peat—13 percent of the world’s blanket bog—and our peatlands currently store over 3 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to all the forests in the UK, Germany and France combined.
An estimated 78 percent of the UK’s peatlands are degrading, meaning that they are spewing out masses of carbon, having been dried out through land management activities – drained for agricultural use, extracted for horticulture, or their heather burnt to maintain grouse moors. Despite peat’s ability to store carbon, this poor state means our peatland are a net source of emissions, releasing an equivalent amount of CO2 to 140,000 cars a year. England is a particularly bad offender; despite containing only one quarter of the UK’s peatland by area, England’s peatlands account for 55 percent of emissions.
In a natural state, peatlands are wetland landscapes which can sequester colossal amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere; a hectare of natural peatbog can remove 3.54 tonnes a year, and a near-natural fen 5.44. We know it will require action at a national and international level to tackle the climate crisis, namely a socialist Green New Deal that radically transforms and rapidly decarbonises our economy. However, considering that around 12 percent of the UK is peatland, restoring the entirety of our peat to a natural state could play a pivotal role in reducing the UK’s—and the world’s—carbon emissions.
With our peatlands being hugely significant to global efforts to combat climate change, it’s fair to ask how they have could reached such a point of degradation. As with most aspects of climate change, this is a question of ownership. Through years of intentional mismanagement, pandering to grouse shooters, and receiving millions in public subsidies for doing so, wealthy landowners have been to permitted to drive our peatlands to the brink.
The Tories routinely say they support a ban on heather burning but have failed to deliver anything resembling this. Instead, they have pursued a series of voluntary agreements asking landowners not to burn. Evidently this has not worked.
It is wholly unacceptable for such globally significant land to remain in destructive private hands. Rather than nicely asking landowners not to use peatlands for shoots, or extract peat for profit, we need to get creative with land use.
