Independence Day from the Eyes of the British

Virginia City 4thOn July 4, 1776, the newly formed United States declared its independence from Britain. In the Declaration of Independence, the country’s founders laid out their grievances with the Crown:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Among the many listed facts: taxation without consent, trial without jury, and quartering of soldiers in the colonies.

Each July 4, we celebrate that independence with parades and picnics, flags and fireworks. Nearly every man, woman, and child dons red, white, and blue in some form or another. It’s the height of American pride. (Although see here for examples of Americans having no idea why we celebrate the Fourth of July or even when and from whom we declared our independence.)

But I’ve never thought to look at the day from another perspective. Until this year.

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America the Beautiful

Pikes PeakIn the summer of 1893, Katharine Lee Bates traveled from Boston, where she was an English professor at Wellesley College, to Colorado to teach a session at Colorado College. While in Colorado Springs, she climbed Pikes Peak, and at the top of the 14,155 foot summit, she began to fashion in her mind the words to the poem that became “America the Beautiful.” When she came down from the mountain, she finished the poem at her hotel. The poem was published two years later in The Congregationalist. The original title of the poem was “America. A poem for July 4.”

When the poem was recast into a hymn by Samuel A. Ward in 1910, the title changed to “America the Beautiful.” Ward was on a ferry in New York when he thought of the tune. In a moment of inspiration, and so he wouldn’t forget the tune, Ward borrowed a friend’s shirt cuff and jotted the notes down on it.

Bates traveled to Colorado by train, and she saw several places that you can see in the poem: the wheat fields of Kansas, the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair, and the Great Plains.

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The Legacy of Gideon v. Wainwright in Wisconsin

I’d like to take the opportunity through my posts this month to talk about some of the trends and milestones that I see in the field of law, particularly as it pertains to our criminal justice system.

Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case, started with a handwritten petition from Clarence Gideon. The decision in Gideon set the country’s criminal justice system on a different course: defendants who could not afford legal counsel had the right be be provided with such representation.

Although the scope of the constitutional right to counsel was established with the Gideon decision, the responsibility and the details of its implementation were left to the individual states. In the early years following the decision, Wisconsin complied with the requirement through a county-by-county system. This county-based approach changed in 1977 when Wisconsin took the strategic step of adopting a statewide model of indigent defense, establishing the Office of the State Public Defender (SPD) as an independent, executive-branch state agency. SPD trial offices started to open across the state, and the appellate representation, previously overseen by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, was transferred to the agency. The SPD ensures that our state meets the constitutional requirements set forth in Gideon.

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