Brett Brownell

Charts: Why You're in Deep Trouble If You Can't Afford a Lawyer

Fifty years after the groundbreaking "Gideon" ruling, public defenders are overworked, underpaid—and America's poor are paying the price.

—By Hannah Levintova, Jaeah Lee, and Brett Brownell

| Mon May. 6, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Watch: Public defenders and legal advocates discuss ways to solve the nation's public defense crisis, 50 years after the Gideon decision:

In January 1962, a man sitting in a Florida prison cell scrawled a note to the United States Supreme Court. He'd been charged with breaking into a pool hall, stealing some Cokes, beer, and change, and was handed a five-year sentence after he represented himself because he couldn't pay for a lawyer. Clarence Earl Gideon's penciled message eventually led to the high court's historic 1963 Gideon v. Wainwright ruling, reaffirming the right to a criminal defense and requiring states to provide a defense attorney to those who can't afford one.

Fifty years after the ruling, many legal advocates contend that the justice system is still failing the poor. Last week, the Supreme Court disappointed reformers when it refused to rule on a case involving a Louisiana man serving a life sentence after waiting five years in jail while the state came up with money to pay his court-appointed lawyer. (The federal system for defending the poor is relatively well resourced, though it's also struggling with budget cuts. Several of the attorneys defending Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev face up to three weeks of sequester-mandated furloughs later this year.)

Just how bad is the state of public defense in America? The charts below detail some of the biggest challenges plaguing the system.

[Read the full article]

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Watch: Ghosts of the Asylums

—By Brett Brownell

| Mon Apr. 29, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Mother Jones' cover story for May/June 2013, "Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.", features a collection of eerie, yet beautiful photographs of abandoned mental hospitals. They're the work of Jeremy Harris, a Brooklyn photographer who began sneaking into these buildings in 2005. In this video Jeremy explains the project and shows off some of the hospital artifacts he's collected along the way.

Note: the video production was originally a co-production between Mother Jones and Tumblr's Storyboard. But following the interview, Tumblr announced it was closing Storyboard.

Quaker Apple Walnut Oatmeal Has More Sugar Than a S'mores Pop Tart

And other surprising facts about your favorite breakfast convenience foods.

—By Kiera Butler and Brett Brownell

| Mon Apr. 15, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

We're told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. For many of us, it's also the most rushed. Convenience foods like frozen waffles, toaster pastries, and cereal are quick, comforting, and often nostalgic. (I will always associate Lucky Charms with Girl Scout camping trips.) But how healthy are they? We decided to find out:

Our analysis of the nutritional labels yielded some surprises. For example: Quaker apple walnut oatmeal contained more sugar (22 grams) than a S'mores Pop Tart (19 grams).

For each category, we tried to choose at least one product whose packaging suggested it was a healthy alternative to traditional breakfast convenience foods. The comparisons were sometimes surprising. For example: Eggo's "nutrigrain" waffle had more sugar than its buttermilk version. Nutritionally speaking, the Nature's Path Wildberry Acai toaster pastry was almost identical to the S'mores Pop Tart—the only differences were that the Wildberry Acai pastry contained slightly more calories and saturated fat, and only one gram less sugar, than the S'mores version.

Here's a comparison of the nutritional labels of each product by category:

Cereals:

Breakfast pastries:

Waffles:

Oatmeals:

Cinnamon breads:

All breakfasts:

Watch: McConnell Says "Political Left Bugged My Headquarters"

Dodging questions about his campaign's plans to bash Ashley Judd, the Senate minority leader invokes a Watergate-style conspiracy.

—By Brett Brownell

| Tue Apr. 9, 2013 12:33 PM PDT

On Tuesday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell declined to respond to questions from reporters about his campaign's plans for attacking Ashley Judd, as revealed in a report by MoJo's David Corn. Instead McConnell simply repeated accusations about a wiretapping conspiracy. Via the Washington Post, watch:

It was "quite a Nixonian move," a deadpan McConnell said. "This is what you get from the political left in America these days."

As we reported on Tuesday, Mother Jones was not involved in the making of the tape; after obtaining it, we published a story on its contents due to their obvious newsworthiness. It is our understanding that the tape was not the product of a Watergate-style bugging operation. Read the full report here.

[H/t Washington Post for the video clip.]

Dawes' "Stories Don't End" Is the Perfect Road Trip Album

—By Brett Brownell

| Mon Apr. 8, 2013 2:00 AM PDT

Photo by Sam Jones

Dawes
Stories Don't End
HUB Records

I was first introduced to Dawes on a stretch of deserted highway in 2010, following the band's first release, North Hills. It was a fitting introduction. My production team and I were struggling to film a grueling cross-country video series, but we lost our motivation somewhere in Mississippi. Our cinematographer thankfully plugged his iPod into the van stereo and launched the opening track, "That Western Skyline." It was soft, simple, and became a prescription for our myopia.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]