In his opinion, Judge Weinstein described the situation of poor women facing the loss of their children as Kafkaesque and said the appointed-counsel system was "largely a sham".
The assigned-counsel system, stitched together to supplement legal services and public defender agencies, has become increasingly burdened as those services are cut and the Legislature extends the right to counsel to more types of cases.
They are a welfare, education and counselling system all wrapped up into one".
He also understood the need for long, and strong, support for people on part-time and correspondence courses, and, with Christodoulou, set up the local and regional tutorial and counselling system for which the university became famous.
Despite the creation of the Counselling system in Tamil Nadu, the state High Court reportedly recently mandated that the government redo the Counselling process, as maldistribution of physicians continued (IBN Live 2012).
But experts counsel optimism: the system is sturdy, adjustable and even reproducible by engineers working to make our future sweaty selves more comfortable.
The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers.
To the extent the dissent suggests that the ICJ's decisions could be read to prevent application of procedural default rules where a defendant's attorney is unaware of Article 36, see post, at 24 25 (opinion of Breyer, J ., this interpretation of the Convention is in sharp conflict with the role of counsel in our system.
These findings also have implications beyond the death penalty and they underscore the importance of a structural understanding of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in our system of criminal justice.
