WisconsinEye Senior Producer Steve Walters sat down with the two coaches of the finalist teams in the Wisconsin High School Mock Trial Tournament. Janel Anderson from Lodi High School, and Kathy Vick-Martini from Rhinelander High School were interviewed. Each of the seven team members were also interviewed. The Supreme Court later ruled that the Rhinelander team won.

If you are poor and charged with a crime in Wisconsin, the odds are you won’t qualify for a lawyer who works for the State Public Defender’s Office. That’s because the income criteria to qualify for a public defender has not been changed since 1987. Panelists on a Legally Speaking show said the outdated income rules make a mockery of the constitutional promise of “equal justice for all” and have created an uneven pattern of counties relying on private lawyers to represent the poor. Panelists were Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, State Public Defender Nick Chiarkas, Rev. Richard Jones of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison and private-bar defense attorney Erik Guenther.

At the end of November, there were 344 sex offenders statewide who judges had deemed “sexually violent persons” – all but 17 of whom were locked up indefinitely because they were likely to attack again. How has the 1994 law that allowed civil commitments for SVPs worked, what is the process that keeps them confined – some of them forever – and what does it cost it cost Wisconsin taxpayers? Assistant Attorney General Michael Schaefer, Department of Corrections supervisor Melissa Roberts, defense attorney Eric Schulenburg and Dr. Stan Stojkovic, dean of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Social Work, explained the SVP process in the third Legally Speaking show.

Former Supreme Court justices William A. Bablitch and Jon P. Wilcox, who served a total of 35 years on the court, joined defense attorney and former Dane County District Attorney Hal Harlowe as panelists on the second Legally Speaking show Tuesday Nov. 24. They discussed controversial attempts to force Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from cases pending before the court because of campaign donations from groups that are parties to those cases, or pre-election comments that defense lawyers say shows a bias against criminal defendants.

Can a Circuit Court judge refuse to accept a plea deal in a drug case, if he believes the deal doesn’t protect the public? The state Supreme Court will rule on that question this term, and panelists on the first Legally Speaking show debated it. Panelists were former Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Eich, defense lawyer and former State Bar President Gerald Mowris, and UW-Madison Law School Professor Michael Smith.