Diary of a Public Defender Drowning in the State of Exception

The public defender and his colleagues are on the receiving end of this machine of detentions and convictions. Whereas before he took on 45 to 50 new cases in a month, under the emergency measures he grew accustomed to seeing 60, then 70, and as many as 95 new case files in a single day. With the exponential growth in cases has also risen the number of desperate families that he receives in his office. “We can no longer even keep track of all the cases,” he says. The Public Defender’s Office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.