In a letter sent earlier this month to leaders of the House and the Senate and the Judiciary and Appropriations committees in both chambers, the judges described themselves as “the boots on the ground in our nation’s federal trial courts.” They offered a detailed, firsthand view of the judiciary’s “unprecedented financial crisis” and its “devastating impact on court operations nationwide. Observers of the federal court system cannot recall the last time such a thing has happened, if it ever has. Chief judges in 86 of the 94 Federal District Courts around the country — more than half of them Republican appointees — have now joined to sound an alarm about the grave damage to the nation’s justice system caused by years of flat financing followed by Washington’s lunatic across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration. Their urgent plea to stop starving federal courts of adequate resources to fulfill the judiciary’s constitutional responsibilities deserves a response from Congress.

For the full editorial see : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/opinion/federal-courts-in-crisis.html?ref=opinion

Meanwhile Peter Hardin reports in Gavel to Gavel that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, calling the federal public defender program “in dire straits,” has urged Congress to restore funds slashed through automatic, across-the-board federal budget cuts called sequestration.

Holder made his appeal in a Washington Post op-ed, declaring that the nation’s systems for funding legal representation for indigent criminal defendants are “in financial crisis, plagued by crushing caseloads and insufficient resources. And this year’s forced budget reductions, due largely to sequestration, are further undermining this critical work.” Holder concluded:

“Five decades after the Supreme Court affirmed that adequate legal representation is a basic right, sequestration is undermining our ability to realize this fundamental promise. The moral and societal costs of inadequate representation are too great to measure. Only Congress has the ability to restore the funding that federal defenders need to ensure that justice can be done. It is past time for our elected representatives to act.”

See more at: http://www.gavelgrab.org/#sthash.8kX5EOIc.dpuf