When he was charged with murder in 1996, James Thomas, an impoverished day laborer in Baton Rouge, became like many other criminal defendants: With no money to hire a lawyer, he had to rely on the government to provide him with one.
He then spent the next 8½ years in jail, waiting for his case to go to trial. It never did.
Last spring, a Louisiana state appeals court ruled that prosecutors had waited too long to try him, and it threw the charge out. By then, Thomas was 34, his alibi witness for the night of the murder had died of kidney disease, and his case had become a symbol of the increasing problems within the nation's public defender system. "I can't think of any reason why he would have so completely fallen off their radar screen except to suggest (public defenders) were so busy and so understaffed and underfunded, they allowed his case to slip," says Chris Alexander, Thomas' new private lawyer. Alexander got the charge dismissed after Thomas' mother scraped together $500 to hire him.
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