The Reality of Criminal Justice for Poor Defendants
Because of his defense lawyer’s incompetence and sloth, Jimmy Ray Bromgard served fourteen years in prison for a child rape that he could not have committed. At about 4 a.m. on March 20, 1987, an intruder broke into a home in Billings, Montana, and raped an eight-year-old girl. The intruder stole a purse and a jacket and fled back out the window. The police arrived, and after questioning the eight-year-old, drew a composite sketch of the perpetrator. One of the officers thought the sketch looked like Bromgard. The police brought Bromgard in and the eight-year-old victim picked him out of a lineup, but she was not sure it was him. She placed her certainty at “60%, 65% sure.” Again at trial, she reiterated that she was “not too sure” about her identification. Bromgard claimed he was innocent and that he had been asleep at home when the crime occurred.
At trial, the state also presented forensic evidence against Bromgard. The semen found on the victim’s underpants could not be typed using then-existing technology, but the state’s expert claimed that hairs found on the victim’s bed sheets could be. He testified that there was less than a 1-in-10,000 chance that the hairs were not Bromgard’s. Unfortunately for Bromgard, this testimony was demonstrably wrong. There has never been a statistically reliable process for comparing hair samples. At best, the numbers were educated guesses; at worst, sheer fabrication. A later peer-review committee of forensic scientists termed the statistical evidence junk science and urged the Montana Attorney General to audit the expert’s other cases.
There was thus much ammunition for a defense lawyer. Unfortunately, Bromgard was appointed John Adams, a local defense lawyer who worked on contract for Yellowstone County, Montana. Nicknamed “Jailhouse John Adams,” he was paid an annual retainer to take appointed cases, regardless of how many he took or how many hours he worked. Unsurprisingly, Adams was not particularly diligent. He had already been found ineffective by a federal court in other cases and was known to miss court appointments while playing cards in a local bar.
Consistent with his reputation, Adams did almost nothing for Bromgard. He met with him once before trial. He hired no investigators or forensic experts. This meant that the prosecution’s expert testimony identifying Bromgard as the rapist to a 1-in-10,000 certainty went virtually unchallenged. Adams did no investigation himself. He filed no pretrial motions challenging the witness identification or the expert’s testimony. He did not prepare Bromgard to testify at trial. He did not present an opening argument. He even failed to file an appeal after Bromgard was found guilty and sentenced to 40 years in prison. And yet the Montana courts repeatedly found Bromgard’s representation effective.
In 2002, Bromgard was exonerated by DNA evidence after serving fourteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. The semen on the girl’s underwear could not possibly have been Bromgard’s.
Sadly and amazingly, Jimmy Ray Bromgard’s story is not unique. Even in the most serious of cases, where a defendant faces the death penalty, court-appointed defense counsel can be jaw-droppingly awful. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it nicely: “I have yet to see a death case, among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve of execution [stay] petitions, in which the defendant was well represented at trial. . . . People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.” Appellate courts have found that defense lawyers who were drunk or asleep or ignorant of the law or disbarred or mentally ill were adequate to satisfy the Constitution’s guarantee of effective counsel.1
This is not a problem limited to the relatively small group of criminal defendants who face the death penalty. To the contrary, the sorry state of criminal defense has a broad effect at all levels of American society. This is partially because criminal law has metastasized to the point where, as federal judge Alex Kozinski has put it, “You’re probably a federal criminal” already.2 It is also partially because few citizens worry too much about the state of criminal defense until they are the ones who need defending.
Take, for example, a case much more common and less weighty than a child-rape or capital-murder trial, and one much more likely to affect the middle class: a charge of driving under the influence (DUI). Before you discount a DUI charge as relatively insignificant, consider that in most states a DUI charge carries a mandatory fine, jail time, public service, and the loss of driving privileges for a year. In some states, it could also result in the seizure of your car. And also remember that, depending on your body weight and blood alcohol level, as few as two beers could put you over the legal limit.
Imagine that you are a pharmaceutical sales representative. On a Friday night, you take a group of doctors and nurses out for drinks and a brief sales presentation. On your way home, a police car pulls you over. The officer asks if you know why she pulled you over. You do not. She mentions that you failed to use your turn signal when you changed lanes. You are pretty sure you did use your turn signal and start to argue. The officer interrupts and asks if you have been drinking. You mention that you have been out for drinks, but did not have more than a glass or two of wine. The officer asks you to step out of the car and then asks you to perform the three standardized field sobriety tests: the walk-and-turn test, the one-legged stand test, and the horizontal-gaze nystagmus. Five years ago, you hurt your right knee running, and you try to tell the officer that you may not be able to perform the tests. The officer asks you not to interrupt and to listen to the instructions. At the end of the tests, the officer announces that you failed and asks you to take a Breathalyzer, which comes in above the legal limit. She then books you for DUI and carts you to the hospital for a blood test.
Because you were arrested on a Friday evening, you may have to spend the weekend in jail, awaiting a bail hearing on Monday morning. If convicted, you will not only risk imprisonment but will also lose your driver’s license for one year. For a pharmaceutical sales rep, that is career suicide.
Fortunately for you, there are several potential defenses: If the officer lacked reasonable suspicion to pull you over (if you did in fact use your turn signal, for example), you can have the charge thrown out. Many squad cars have video recordings, but copies are available only if properly requested. If the officer administered the field sobriety tests incorrectly, or if your knee made performance impossible, you may also have a chance. You could also argue that the Breathalyzer was inaccurate (a surprisingly common occurrence).3 Even the results of a hospital blood test can be debunked, because they usually occur at a time lag from the driving itself.
Even a routine case, then, involves complicated moving parts and high stakes for the defendant’s liberty versus society’s safety. Unfortunately for you, presenting any of these defenses is highly technical and expensive, and well beyond the ability of almost any pro se defendant. Hiring a lawyer to defend a DUI case is not cheap. In Knoxville, Tennessee, the typical charge just for the first step of the process (the preliminary hearing) is between $2,000 and $10,000. A representation from first appearance to a jury trial can run into six figures. People are willing to pay these prices because the ramifications of a DUI are so weighty. An appointed lawyer is a possibility, but most middle-class individuals earn too much to qualify. Many states set the eligibility limit at 25% above the federal poverty line, so in 2016 a single person would need to earn less than $14,850 a year to qualify.4
Even if you earn that little, good luck getting an appointed lawyer to pursue each of the avenues of possible defense outlined above. First-offense DUI is frequently a misdemeanor, meaning a fee cap of as low as a few hundred dollars, hardly enough to cover more than a few hours of work.
In theory, American criminal justice depends on a contest of equals. In this boxing ring, the defense lawyer is the champion in the defendant’s corner. Our adversarial system counts on the defense lawyer to challenge the prosecution’s case vigorously, to test whether a defendant is guilty and what punishment he deserves. Criminal defense lawyers are supposed to ensure the accuracy and fairness of lineups, police interrogations, guilty pleas, trials, sentencings, and appeals. To defend well, a defense lawyer must meet with his client multiple times to build trust and draw out the whole story as well as leads on potential alibi and character witnesses. If his client is held in jail, he must repeatedly wait in line and clear security pat-downs and scans in order to visit him. He must then track down potential defense witnesses, spend time talking with them, and locate everything from medical records to forensic experts. He must become familiar with the entire case and consider possible defenses and alternative explanations, as well as factors that might warrant a reduced or alternative sentence. He must negotiate over a possible plea bargain, stand ready to try the case if needed, and advocate at sentencing and on appeal, which requires researching and writing a substantial appellate brief. All of these steps take time—weeks or days, not just hours—but harried defense attorneys rarely have time to spare.
The reality falls far short of this ideal. As this chapter explains, criminal caseloads are too great, and funding too scarce, for defense lawyers to match the prosecution. Defense lawyers are paid significantly less than prosecutors, making it hard to attract talent, and they lack the prosecution’s police investigators, crime labs, and other support. They must also juggle hundreds of cases at a time, making it impossible to investigate, analyze, and vigorously defend each one. Each jury trial requires dozens if not hundreds of hours for pretrial preparation, motions, witness interviews, jury selection, jury instructions, and rehearsing direct- and cross-examination as well as opening statements and closing arguments. Instead, defense lawyers plea bargain most cases quickly, sometimes right after meeting their clients for the first time. In practice, they can do little to test guilt.
There is another casualty: the jury trial. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights knows that the Framers counted on the jury to be the ultimate bulwark against government power. Instead, the jury trial has been virtually sidelined by rampant plea bargaining in a criminal system that could not possibly try even 10% of the cases filed.
Each year, American police make 13 million arrests. Half a million are for serious violent felonies like murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Arrests for serious property crimes (like burglary and theft), drug crimes, driving under the influence, and non-aggravated assaults number about a million and a half each. The indigent defense system is poorly equipped to devote individualized attention to this constant barrage of cases for two related reasons: underfunding and overwork, which together breed poor performance.5
Underfunding
Half a century ago, Gideon promised equal justice to rich and poor alike, but Gideon’s promise remains chronically underfunded. At least once a decade, a new report comes out decrying the state of Gideon’s promise and noting the problem has only gotten worse since the last report. In the early 1970s, just a decade after Gideon, money and manpower shortages had “seriously crippled” effective representation, including the extension of appointed counsel to misdemeanor cases. In the 1980s, funding for indigent defense remained “grossly inadequate.” By the 1990s, “[t]he long-term neglect and underfunding of indigent defense ha[d] created a crisis of extraordinary proportions in many states throughout the country.” In the early 2000s, the ABA marked Gideon’s fortieth anniversary with a report lamenting “that a significant funding crisis persists today.” A 2009 report noted that, because indigent defense costs keep rising and the economy remains weak, “Funding shortages are guaranteed to worsen.” And in 2013, a report marking Gideon’s fiftieth anniversary found that the result of these funding shortages was “staggeringly low rates of compensation for assigned counsel across the nation.” While some states have raised funding or taken over responsibility from counties, sometimes funding increases have not even kept up with inflation, let alone caseloads.6
While federal and state governments have large criminal justice budgets, totaling $179 billion annually in 2007, most of that money goes to police, prosecutors, crime labs, prisons, and the like. Only 2% of that total supports indigent criminal defense. The amount spent on indigent defense each year, $3.5 billion, sounds like a lot, but that total must cover more than a million felony cases and at least as many serious misdemeanors each year. That means each case averages a total of perhaps one workday of a defense lawyer’s time, with little support for private investigators, forensic science experts, and the like, let alone for the days and weeks needed to go to trial. State and county defense budgets are more likely to be cut than other parts of the criminal justice system and much less likely to keep up with inflation and rising criminal caseloads.7
Across the country, indigent defense receives far less money than prosecution each year. In Tennessee, for example, the $130 million-plus spent on prosecution is more than double the $57 million for indigent defense; in California, the disparity is more than $300 million each year and growing. In some places, defense funding depends on unreliable sources such as traffic tickets, fines, or court fees, which may not keep up with rising caseloads.8
The chronic funding squeeze hurts defendants in a number of ways. First, it means that there are fewer defense lawyers to handle the same number of cases charged by prosecutors. Across the country, there are many more prosecutors than public defenders. In a rural New Jersey county, for instance, the prosecutor’s office has twice as many lawyers and seven times as many investigators. In New Orleans, the ratio is almost three prosecutors per public defender. And in Houston, the district attorney’s office budget is twice as large as that for indigent defense.9
Second, underfunding squeezes compensation. Some appointed lawyers are public defenders, who are salaried, full-time employees specializing in criminal defense. Idealism draws talented and public-spirited young lawyers to public defense, but financial pressures as well as crushing caseloads burn them out and make it hard for them to stay. Public defenders’ salaries average in the mid-five figures, starting around $50,000, less than a third of the starting salary at the biggest law firms. Many public defenders still owe big student loan debts from college and law school and struggle to make ends meet. In the words of a public defender, “If you want to raise a family, buy a house and a car, that’s not going to happen.” Lawyers may thus avoid taking these jobs in the first place, or must leave them after a few years. They may even have to moonlight, holding a second job to make ends meet. The salary squeeze makes it hard to attract and retain talent and cultivate expertise. Excessive turnover means public defenders may have less experience and expertise than their prosecutor opponents.10
Other appointed defense lawyers are called “assigned counsel,” meaning that they work as solo practitioners or in small private law firms but accept some court-appointed cases for a fee. Some lawyers, especially young ones, volunteer for these cases to gain experience or fill spare time; others are dragooned by courts that need warm bodies, even if they do not ordinarily do criminal work. These lawyers have to cover their office rent, utilities, secretaries, computerized research, and the like. In part to cover these overhead expenses (which average $80 per hour), private lawyers charge private clients close to $200 per hour or more.11
Assigned counsel, by contrast, earn only a fraction of that for court-appointed cases: Hourly rates for felony defense average less than $65, and rates for misdemeanors are often closer to $50. Moreover, hourly compensation is often capped around a few thousand dollars for felonies and several hundred dollars for misdemeanors (as little as $180 in New Mexico), meaning there is often no additional pay for investing more than ten or twenty hours.12
Some counties try to save money by using a third option, contract attorneys. The county contracts with a law firm, often the lowest bidder, to accept some or all court appointments in exchange for a flat fee per case or for the entire caseload. In other words, lawyers are paid per contract or per case, not per hour.
For both assigned counsel working under a fee cap and contract attorneys paid a flat fee regardless of what they do, the natural incentive is to invest little work and plead cases out swiftly. Conscientious lawyers strive in good faith to represent their clients zealously, but they are forced to juggle enough cases to pay their secretaries and office rent and put food on their tables. Preparing a case and proceeding to trial is almost never cost-effective, so it remains rare. For attorneys who carry both court-appointed and privately retained cases, minimizing work on appointed cases leaves more time for more lucrative private cases. Thus, studies of assigned-counsel systems find that low pay drives away qualified defense lawyers and discourages effective preparation.13
Contract attorneys face an inherent conflict of interest, encouraging them to do the bare minimum needed to earn their flat fees and scrape a profit from their low-bid contracts. The winning bidders are not the most zealous defenders, but the ones who put in the least work. Trial courts may like and favor such low bidders, because they make their clients plead guilty fast and thus spare the courts work. Empirical studies confirm that contract attorneys file fewer motions, seek less expert assistance, are less likely to take cases to trial, more often have their clients plead guilty immediately, and provide worse representation overall.14
Take, for example, a poor misdemeanor defendant in Chicago. His lawyer can earn only $30 per hour of out-of-court time up to a maximum of $150. If the lawyer persuades his client to plead guilty immediately, he stays under the cap. But if he investigates the case and prepares for trial, there is zero additional compensation beyond five hours’ work. Few lawyers will try cases for free instead of jumping at whatever plea is offered.
Or take a first-degree felony defendant in New Mexico, where assigned lawyers earn a flat $700 for the entire case (even less for less serious felonies). If the lawyer persuades the client to plead guilty immediately or before much investigation, the lawyer can cover several hundred dollars’ overhead and turn a profit. If instead he spends dozens of hours investigating, interviewing witnesses, negotiating, and preparing seriously for trial, he earns zero additional pay. In short, low hourly rates, flat fees, and fee caps discourage hard work and zealous representation.15
Let us be clear that we are blaming the system, not the defense lawyers. None of the criticisms discussed here depends on imputing greed or selfishness to well-meaning public servants. Regardless of their laudable motivations and intentions, the problem is baked into the system’s underfunding and overwork.
Third, underfunding hits not only defense lawyers but also their support staff. Because of custom, practice, and the rules of ethics, lawyers are not supposed to testify in their own cases. That means that prosecutors and defense lawyers must rely on others to interview witnesses, visit crime scenes, or conduct scientific tests if they want that evidence to be usable in court. This is rarely a problem for prosecutors because they build their cases on police detective work, with follow-up by in-house investigators, coroners, doctors, and forensic experts. Prosecutors likewise can rely upon larger staffs of paralegals and secretaries, and better libraries and technology.
Defense lawyers can rarely match the prosecution team. They have few if any in-house investigators to check possible alibis and no crime labs to analyze drugs or bullets. In Houston, for example, the district attorney’s office has funding for thirty investigators compared with zero for the defense. Across the country, funding for interpreters and medical and scientific experts is paltry, and courts are reluctant to authorize such expenses. Nevada judges have punished defense attorneys who request expert funding, and an Indiana judge even admitted that he had stopped assigning cases to a lawyer because he had filed too many motions, visited his jailed clients too often, and sought too much in reimbursements. Clark County, Washington closed down a contract attorney office for seeking too much money, and Montana officials have likewise threatened to terminate attorneys’ contracts for seeking modifications or too many psychological evaluations. Contract attorneys, who usually have to pay experts out of their own flat contractual fees, are often unwilling to cut into their already meager compensation. Defense lawyers’ libraries and computers may also be inadequate and outdated. Even bare necessities such as desks, bookcases, telephones, and private interview rooms may be in short supply, as they were in San Francisco and Prince George’s County, Maryland.16
Underfunding also means that the law on the books may not match the reality on the ground. The failure to provide adequate funding for needed expert witnesses is one example. Another is the failure to provide free lawyers in misdemeanor cases. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that misdemeanor defendants have a right to court-appointed counsel in any case in which they ultimately receive actual jail time or even a suspended sentence. Even though states are bound to follow these rules, sometimes they do not. So, for instance, the Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court openly criticized the requirement of lawyers for suspended sentences as “misguided, . . . so I will tell you straight up we [are] not adhering to [that requirement] in every situation.” Some Michigan courts do not even offer counsel in misdemeanor cases. In many other situations, judges and prosecutors routinely bargain with unrepresented defendants, do not tell them their rights to counsel, and get them to waive (give up) their right to appointed counsel.17
Excessive Caseloads
The twin problem of underfunding is overwork. Professional standards recommend that defense attorneys carry a maximum of 150 felony cases, or 400 misdemeanors, per year. Even these benchmarks are contested and seem very high, particularly if lawyers lack private investigators and other support. Assuming time off for two weeks’ vacation and government holidays, there are roughly 240 working days a year. The recommended caseloads mean that a lawyer would handle one felony every 1.6 days or almost two misdemeanors a day. Obviously very, very few of those cases could proceed to trial or even receive significant investigation or motions practice.
In reality, however, defense lawyers routinely juggle far more than these recommended caseloads, sometimes hundreds more. Miami’s public defenders face annual caseloads of nearly 500 felonies or more than 2,200 misdemeanors, yet that office’s budget was recently cut by an eighth. In Chicago, Atlanta, and Utah, annual misdemeanor caseloads exceed 2,000. As noted, even as criminal caseloads keep rising, the number of public defenders lags behind the number of prosecutors, driving up each public defender’s caseload.18
Underfunding also exacerbates caseloads for assigned counsel. If they are paid low and capped amounts per case, they may have to accept more cases than they can handle well in order to make a living.19
Contract attorneys have it worst of all. Some contracts require the winning bidder to accept however many cases are filed, often for the same overall flat fee. If caseloads jump, they must do far more for the same amount of money by getting rid of cases as fast as possible. One county contracted with a three-person firm to handle about half of its caseload for just over $400,000, amounting to 1,523 felonies plus 3,587 misdemeanors that year. That works out to about $80 per case for all fees and costs. Each case averaged less than one minute of private-investigator time. Of the more than 5,000 cases that year, only 12 went to trial—less than one quarter of one percent. Two of the lawyers split the felonies, meaning each disposed of about 761 felony cases that year, almost all by guilty plea. A single associate handled all 3,587 misdemeanors, nearly 300 per month, by pleading them all out at the first court appearance. When the misdemeanor associate was given a felony case, she saw a strong argument for suppressing the evidence from a warrantless search. But after she asked for more time to develop her client’s strong argument, she was fired for refusing to flush the case with a guilty plea.20
Like underfunding, overwork has long persisted and grown despite calls for change. In 1973, average caseloads already exceeded the professional standards just mentioned. They spiked in the 1980s and 1990s and remained excessive over the last two decades. The problem is a chronic one.21
Instead of thoroughly investigating, discussing, negotiating, and contesting guilt, busy defense lawyers dispose of cases as fast as they can. They rarely file motions or objections, let alone go to trial. They often meet their clients for the first time in courthouse holding cells and hurriedly converse for a few moments before having the client plead guilty and be sentenced. This common practice is known as “meet ’em, greet ’em, and plead ’em” (or just “meet ’em and plead ’em”). Thus, an Atlanta public defender may receive up to forty-five new cases at an arraignment, meet them all while they are chained together in a courthouse cell, and have many of them plead guilty and be sentenced right there.
Of New Orleans defender Rick Teissier’s 418 cases over seven months, dozens of which were serious felonies, he pleaded out nearly a third of them at arraignment, the first formal hearing on the criminal charge. A recent Florida study found that 70% of misdemeanor defendants pleaded guilty at arraignment; one third of them did so without a lawyer. These arraignments lasted, on average, for less than three minutes. A lawyer who has just met his client in a courthouse hallway or holding cell can do little to explore possible defenses or mitigating circumstances. He simply pushes the case along like another widget on the plea-bargaining assembly line.22
In many places, lawyers often are not appointed immediately or are too busy to meet with their clients right away, so their clients may languish in jail for months. By that time, a jailed defendant charged with loitering, prostitution, or public intoxication may already have served more time than the typical sentence for a minor charge. As a result, defendants plead guilty in exchange for time served, rather than fight it out.23
Ineffectiveness
Partly as a result of overfunding and overwork, appointed defense lawyers sometimes perform poorly. Lawyers who are overwhelmed with cases often do little or no investigation, consult no experts, file no motions, and settle for whatever plea and sentence the prosecutor chooses to offer initially. Flooded with cases, they also grow cynical and burn out.
But the effectiveness problem extends beyond lack of time and overwork. Appointed defense counsel receive paltry pay and endure poor working conditions, making it hard to attract talent and retain seasoned veterans. There are basically three types of lawyers who are willing to endure these conditions. First, some lawyers become public defenders out of a sense of mission or ideological commitment to the cause, which can inspire them to brave adversity and fight hard. Many young idealists eventually burn out, but in the meantime they bring energy to their mission. Second, some young lawyers take court appointments or public defender jobs long enough to try some cases, make names for themselves, and gain marketable experience. But once they have trial experience, they are more likely to use it on behalf of more lucrative paying clients. They may continue to take a few court appointments to fill spare time, but seldom specialize in them.24 Third are the leftover lawyers at the bottom of the market. Lawyers whom few private clients would hire may wind up with court-appointed cases instead, regardless of the stakes. There are few checks to ensure minimal talent and performance.
In this third category, there are many stories of defense lawyers who nap during parts of trials, alcoholics who are arrested for driving while intoxicated on their way to court, and defense lawyers who are mentally ill or use cocaine or amphetamines during trial. Yet courts sometimes do not replace these lawyers, remove them from appointment lists, or overturn resulting convictions. On the contrary, some judges discount these evident impairments, let these lawyers continue, and even praise their work. Judy Haney, for example, faced the death penalty for murdering her abusive husband. Though the stakes could not have been higher, the judge held her lawyer in contempt for showing up to trial visibly drunk at 9:30 a.m., and then let him finish out the trial the next day. If even napping, drunk, or drugged lawyers may pass muster, then garden-variety incompetence hardly raises eyebrows. The standard of competence is shockingly low and in hindsight convictions seem to have been inevitable, so there is no harm, no foul. As the vice president of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association put it, “You put a mirror under the court-appointed lawyer’s nose, and if the mirror clouds up, that’s adequate counsel.”25
Even in capital cases, defendants fighting for their lives may be stuck with defense lawyers who do not take the most basic steps for their clients. They may not find alibi witnesses, medical records that corroborate a self-defense claim, or evidence that a client is mentally retarded or schizophrenic. Some defense lawyers may do nothing for their clients and even undermine their cases. At James Messer’s capital trial, his lawyer gave no opening statement, barely cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses, presented no defense witnesses or evidence, made no objections, failed to develop obvious mitigating evidence, and repeatedly suggested that his own client deserved to die. As a result, Messer was executed. Other capital defense lawyers have referred to their own clients using racial slurs such as “nigger,” “wet back,” and “little old nigger boy.”26
The bottom line is grim. You get what you pay for, and we as a society are politically unwilling to pay for much. Limited defense funding cannot keep up with rising caseloads, let alone attract and retain enough good, experienced defense lawyers and support. America spends plenty to arrest and prosecute criminal cases, but will not level the playing field with equal funding for the defense. Other factors include the complexity of our legal system, the cost of support and overhead, and the substantial time needed to investigate and tailor each client’s defense. Underfunding breeds overwork, and together they lead to poor defense lawyering. The reality is much darker than Gideon’s shining ideal.