Jonathan Rapping, a lawyer and champion of legal defense by training, was named as one of this year's MacArthur Fellows, a class of 21 professionals doing innovative work across various fields including filmmaking, physics, and poetry. In 2007 Rapping and his wife Iham Askia, a former schoolteacher, founded the Southern Public Defender Training Center, an organization designed to better equip public defenders with the skills necessary to navigate a legal system that often fails poor, minority defendants.
Rapping and his team have since renamed the training center "Gideon's Promise" after Gideon v. Wainwright, a pivotal 1963 Supreme Court decision that established the right to legal defense for all citizens accused of a crime. Despite being a monumental step in the right direction, Rapping says, Gideon alone cannot do enough to combat the failings of the modern American court system.
[For more of this story, written by Charles Pulliam-Moore, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/codes...r-clients-not-judges]
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