If the court comes to see the SG as simply another political player from the executive branch, I think that's an institutional problem going forward for the officer.

We call this the gross spectacle of a divided defense, which I think is not just a threat

to Mr. McCoy's liberty, but really to the legitimacy of the criminal justice system

itself.

Can we even call it assistance of counsel?

Is that what it is when a lawyer overrides that person's wishes?

Hi, and welcome to Amicus, Lates, podcast about the Supreme Court and the lower courts and the

law. This week, the High Court will roll into its long break, so things will be dark on Maryland Avenue next week.

But the court did hear arguments this very week in a case involving a Louisiana death row

inmate who wants a new trial because, oh, his lawyer told the jury he was guilty.

Later on in the show, we are going to talk to veteran Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse about some of the shifts that have happened in the Solicitor General's office and the Justice Department in the Trump era.

And I also felt that I needed to note here that just hours after we wrapped last show about an Ohio voting purge, the president's vote fraud commission was disbanded.

You may remember we kept putting that commission in air quotes. It seems amicus, air quotes,

get results. But first, we're going to pop into oral arguments that took place this past Wednesday

in a really interesting case about whether a defendant's own lawyer has afforded him effective assistance of counsel when he keeps telling the jury that his client did it.

And he's telling the jury his client did it over the repeated insistence by the client that, no, I'm innocent.

Joining us to walk us through this case is Jay Schweikert.

He's a policy analyst with the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice.

His research and advocacy focuses on accountability for prosecutors and police and Sixth Amendment trial rights.

And he was co-author of an amicus brief filed on behalf of the Capitol defendant in this case, McCoy v. Louisiana. Jay, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me. And I realized that was a bit of a flip characterization of the facts of the case, but that's the case, right? Yes, I think that's the

basic issue. Here we had a defendant who insisted that he was innocent, that he was, that he didn't

...