This week on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, former Washington Post reporter Karen Houppert talks about her latest book, Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice. The Supreme Court’s Gideon v. Wainwright decision established a criminal defendant’s right to an attorney in 1963. Houppert tells Lopate about the people she met who relied on public defenders when they couldn’t afford their own — and suffered as a result. Fifty years after Gideon, she says, indigent defendants are still waiting for justice.
