By Jo Wilding
June 14th

Victor has been a lawyer for 25 years, mostly in criminal defence. His was the case that established that Native American prisoners have the right to refuse to have their hair cut in jail.

In the US, lawyers can only practise in the state in which they passed their bar exam. You can study at home for another state’s bar qualification but there’s no process of apprenticeship as there is in the UK. Once you pass the bar you can start advertising and practising. The purely market-based system of entry to law colleges means there are more lawyers than there is demand (or people who can afford their services). Hence, Victor explained, the preponderance of adverts for class action lawsuits in the US. An excess of lawyers produces an excess of cases.

The pay for a public defender is good enough, Victor said � the equivalent of a lawyer paid for by legal aid in the UK. It’s just that judges will rarely approve the funding for finding and calling expert defence witnesses, whereas the state is able to access experts for the prosecution.

There’s a strong systemic tilt in favour of the prosecution, Victor said. The judge won’t be responsible for hearing the appeal so, once he’s made the judgement, it’s out of his hands. But a conviction makes almost everyone happy: the police, the prosecution, the victim or victim’s family; even the jury feel like they’ve done something useful.

Victor came from Boston, moved to Phoenix 35 years ago: “And I should’ve left 34 years ago,” he muttered with apparently characteristic grumpiness. A factory worker, he spent his nights spraying stencil graffiti against the Vietnam war. Eventually arrested, he was charged with something to do with unauthorised advertising. He went to the university law library, defended himself on the basis that the legislation invoked was intended to prevent � as you might assume � unauthorised commercial advertising, not political expression.

“Case dismissed,” the judge said. “Now go to law school.” And he did.

Driving into Phoenix a man called David pointed out a river-shaped lake. Dammed three times higher up its course, the Salt River is now a dry bed on most of its course through the city. Water supplies for the population have to be piped in from elsewhere and a small stretch of the river has been reflooded with water imported from the Colorado River. Abruptly the river-lake ends, reverting to a deep stony ditch, a monument to stupidity.

In a similar arse-backwards scheme, ‘President’ Bush came to Phoenix to promote his housing plan, a plot to take money out of low income housing projects and divert it into loans for wealthier people. David teaches political science at the University of Phoenix and had his students research the details and implications of the policy. “They held a press conference, caused quite a stir and somewhat undermined Bush’s visit,” David said, but he added that most of the students take a generally pragmatic view of the course, just wanting to graduate, not necessarily to explore.

At the talk, a man whose name I don’t know came and asked me where I got my accent. At home, I said. It’s pretty much bog-standard non-specific southern England.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought maybe Iraq had once been a British colony and all the Iraqis speak like that and you picked it up from them.”

“No, I actually am English and Iraq was a part of the British empire for a while but the Iraqis speak Arabic, not English.”

“Oh,” he said again. “Well, my wife is a speech therapist. She can teach you to talk with a Hollywood accent if you like.”

From time to time I make a fool of myself and / or confuse everyone by assuming that Americans are being sarcastic when they’re not.

Dahr’s e mail said that, in the first 13 days of June, there were 16 car bombs in Iraq. The Deputy Finance Minister and a high ranking Ministry of Education were killed, as was a geography professor, yet another in the killing spree against academics since the occupation started.