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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Adoption and the Indian Child Welfare Act

Although major cases involving gay marriage have grabbed most of the headlines in recent weeks, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down yet another important family law case at the end of this year’s term. In Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 570 U.S. ___ (2013), the Court held in a 5-4 decision that Sections 1912(d) and 1912(f) of the Indian Child Welfare Act do not apply in situations where a parent has never had custody of his child. This reversed a South Carolina Supreme Court decision and remanded an already protracted adoption and custody dispute for still more proceedings in state court.

The facts of the case are mostly undisputed. Baby Girl’s parents, who lived about four hours away from each other, became engaged in December 2008. About a month later, Birth Mother (who is “predominantly Hispanic”) informed Birth Father (a member of the Cherokee Nation) that she was pregnant. The relationship went downhill thereafter, apparently at least partly because the couple differed over what to do next: Birth Father wanted to move up the wedding and refused to provide financial support until after the marriage while Birth Mother did not agree to this and broke off the engagement in May,2009. In June of that year, Birth Mother sent a text message to Birth Father, asking if he preferred relinquishing his parental rights or paying child support, and he texted back that he would rather give up his rights. It is undisputed that Birth Father provided no financial or other support to the mother or baby during the pregnancy or during the four months after Baby Girl was born.

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