Major funding for this podcast has been provided by Public Welfare Foundation and the Pulitzer Center.

Hey y'all, this is episode two of a five-part series. So if you didn't start from the beginning, trust me, it'll make a lot more sense if you stop right here and go back to episode one.

I just remember telling them that they was making a mistake. They was making a mistake.

And I thought that they were going to figure this out while we get downtown.

23 years later, we still haven't quite figured it out.

Or they haven't at least.

In episode one, we introduced you to Ricky Kidd, the Kansas City man who in 1997 was found

guilty of double homicide and then sentenced to life without parole.

And to this day, he maintains he's innocent of that crime.

If Ricky Lumpurikid isn't a case of real innocence, then does such exist?

Ricky Kids' case represents a fundamental problem with our justice system,

that public defenders just have too many cases

and not enough time to give all their cases the treatment that they need. So poor defendants

like Ricky suffer. This notion that somebody is going to get charged properly and represented,

if he's poor or indigent, and represent it properly, that's a false notion.

This idea Ricky's talking about the right to a lawyer for people who can't afford to pay for

one, how did we get that right in the first place? To understand that, we need to go back to 1963,

when a poor man in Florida demanded a lawyer

from the highest court in the country

and won that fight.

How we built a public defender's system

and how we broke it.

...