"Waah! Waah! Since experts like me wouldn't have played the new all-time Scrabble record game that way, I decree that it shouldn't count."

Whiner. Take it like a wordsmith.

Well, it finally happened - I actually saw a negative ad from a Democratic group against a Republican candidate, and it was shameful. It's a local TV ad against Anthony Sykes, a Republican running for Oklahoma State Senate district 24 against Democratic incumbent Daisy Lawler.

Now, given how odious state senate Republican leaders have behaved (see Glenn Coffee), I would not be able to vote for Sykes because he'd put Coffee and his ilk in charge of the upper chamber. I don't live in district 24 anyway, and I don't really know anything about either Sykes or Lawler anyway. (However, the "latest news" page on Sykes' campaign site has only two entries - pictures of him with the head of Ladies Against Women, and with the poster boy for Corporation Commission Corruption. That should tell tell you all you need to know about the kind of corrupt and repressive government Sykes would provide.)

But the ad was horrible. Does it take on Sykes for thinking women shouldn't have the right to control their own bodies, or for supporting Corporation Commissioners who were, on the record, bought and paid for by the telephone companies? Do they even attack Sykes for not having a single issue position on his obviously well-designed Web site?

No - they attack him for being a public defender, something Sykes is even too chicken to mention on his site (he only says that he "practiced law" in Oklahoma County). Now remember, please, that public defenders are assigned so that everyone can have something that at least looks like a fair trial - even though vastly underpaid and without anywhere near the resources of the prosecution, public defenders are all that stand between indigent people accused of crimes and jail or prison terms without anyone even bothering to see if they're guilty or not. Your access to justice is not supposed to be predicated on your access to cash, and without public defenders, we couldn't even pretend that's true.

Here's my transcript of the ad, all done in voice-over by a narrator:

Anthony Sykes wants to represent us in the state senate - but who has he represented in the past?

As a public defender, Sykes represented a prostitute, and tried to strike down a law keeping prostitutes away from churches and schools. [picture of empty swinging playground swings]

Sykes represented a drug dealer, and even represented a convicted rapist.

Anthony Sykes. He represents them. We can't let him represent us.

[on-screen text: "Anthony Sykes Doesn't Represent Us." In smaller text: "Paid for the by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. This advertisement is not authorized or approved by any candidate."]

A Republican public defender is rare enough anyway, especially one who seems to hold Sykes' repressive political views. But for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee to bitch that he's unqualified for office because people actually got fair trials? This is the only money I've seen them spend in the local market this year, and it's for a district that barely touches the OKC metro area, and it's attacking fair trials? Reprehensible.

And before anyone who's "tough on crime" expresses disdain that defendants actually had attorneys at their trials or in their plea-bargains, they should remember that unequal representation makes for an unfair trial, and an unfair trial often gets thrown out on appeal, meaning everyone has to go through the trial over and over again until the defendant finally gets a fair trial.

Aside from TV dramas, guilty people rarely get acquitted at trial. Even Justice Scalia pointed out this year that the presumption that police officers are professional and punished for mistakes is huge, and it means that jurors are unlikely to come into a trial believing that a case against an innocent person would have made it that far if the person were really innocent. The presumption among most jurors is that police officers are telling the truth and defense witnesses probably are not. Remove any competent defense counsel from this scenario and there's no way the trial can even appear to be "fair," so it gets thrown out and they do it again, and again, and again if necessary.

Competent defense counsel means that the prosecution - the "people" - have to prove their case, and in most cases that's just not very hard to do. Public defenders provide that assurance for people who have no money, because an incorrect arrest shouldn't mean a long prison sentence for the poor but not the well-off. If you want to see what happens in a system where the prosecution is used to not having to prove its case and expects the jury to simply believe whatever it says and believe the defense is wrong, well, look at the O.J. Simpson case. Whether you believe the man killed two people or not, nearly everyone realizes that the prosecution did not prove its case. Good public defenders make those kinds of blunders a lot less likely, so everyone benefits - and that's not even mentioning that a good PD will win cases against people who were wrongly accused.

For the DLCC to rail against a candidate who apparently has lots of bad ideas solely because, as a public defender, he actually defended his clients like he's supposed to do? That's pathetic, especially when the DLCC has so many outstanding Oklahoma candidates that could use the support for all they've done and will do for this state, running against no-record name-recognition-only GOP candidates who apparently believe in hereditary public office. It's worse than disappointing - it's disgusting.