The Voice of the Individual

There are numerous ways in which I find myself applying principles I’ve learned in my political science courses to the work I do with the Shelby County Public, but I noticed that one particular theme has stood out recently. This theme, which is at the center of politics and government in general but which plays a particularly important role in the American system, is our solution to the question of how to make one unified body of government out of many thousands or millions of citizens. The theme is famously contained in the motto of the United States Government, E pluribus Unum. Among the problems immediately derived from this theme is the question of how to balance the rights of a collective nation against the rights of an individual in it, since (very nearly) all of us agree that some degree of individual right and freedom is essential to being in the state of liberty that this country promises to its citizens.
The Public Defender is a very significant part of our answer to the conflict between collective and individual rights. The District Attorney and the prosecutors, of course, are the “voice of the people” in court cases, because they represent the public (the citizens of the county, state, or nation depending on circumstances of the given case) exercising its right to bring legal action against an individual accused of violating the law. What the Public Defender provides, then, is an absolutely essential protection of the individual rights of each person that the public has chosen to prosecute. The Shelby County Public Defender’s purpose is to safeguard the rights of individuals in the county. This theme has come up in conversations I’ve had with people in the office. My supervisor called the public defenders “defenders of the Constitution” because they ensure that their clients’ constitutional rights have not been violated. The Chief Public Defender, Stephen Bush, has said that he never feels any resentment towards the prosecutors since they represent the people of the county, a function that is just as important as the one that he himself fulfills.