Palm Beach public defender candidate Adam Frankel recently sent a misleading and deceptive campaign message, stating that his opponent supports lowering cash bail for “some accused felons, potentially putting dangerous individuals back on our streets faster.”
That message appears to quote from the Sun Sentinel and in fact looks like an endorsement from the Sun Sentinel. In reality, it’s not a direct quote, nor did the Sun Sentinel endorse Frankel. In fact, both the Sun Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post have endorsed Frankel’s opponent, Daniel Eisinger.
Putting aside the misleading nature of Frankel’s ad, the message makes clear that Frankel misunderstands the role of the office he seeks.
The public defender does not set bail; that is the role of the judge. His claims are especially troubling because public defenders, and all lawyers, have an ethical and constitutional duty to advocate for each client’s best interest. For pretrial clients who are presumed innocent, this means asking the judge to lower cash bail.
This kind of rhetoric erodes public trust in our adversarial system of justice as well as the trust clients must have in their lawyers. Calling for public defenders to not fully perform their duties destroys the constitutional right to an effective lawyer and a fair trial.
In counties where the public defender has taken a similar approach to Frankel’s message, it has resulted in disproportionately long sentences, complaints of ineffective assistance of counsel and even wrongful convictions.
Donnie Murrell, Jupiter
The writer is a founding member of, and is speaking on behalf of, the Palm Beach Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
How to track speeders
Paul Novack’s recent Sun Sentinel essay on the lack of FHP troopers identifies ways to juggle existing funds to increase FHP’s presence on our highways.
Here’s a thought: SunPass toll data has been used to identify drivers who (as public officials) may not live in communities where they are elected to govern.
SunPass tracks toll violators, and it can calculate the time taken to travel a certain distance and to calculate a driver’s average speed. Drivers breaking a certain speed should be sent tickets. Funding will roll in and some drivers may actually slow down.
Jay Pellis, Coral Springs
Cushioning Trump’s fall?
The QAnon conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec announced on his website that he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump’s stumble-and-fumble press conference on Aug. 8.
Posobiec is perhaps best known for spreading the evil myth that Democrats in Washington ran a child sex abuse ring in the basement of a popular pizza restaurant in the nation’s capital. In Posobiec’s perverted presentation, children were eaten as well as raped.
In the same announcement, Posobiec plugged Mike Lindell’s “MyPillow” products, apparently to ease Lindell’s struggle with bankruptcy after Lindell failed to prove that the 2020 election was “rigged” against Trump. Posobiec directed followers to Lindell’s website, where they would get 65% off his pillow products.
Enter Trump’s vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, who is already taking heat for writing a foreword to a forthcoming book by a Trump ally, Kevin Roberts, who prepared much of the controversial Project 2025 manifesto.
Vance was anything but Q-Anonymous when he wrote a blurb for Posobiec’s book: “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions.” The “unhumans” targeted in this work included domestic civil rights activists. Maybe Trump, Vance and Posobiec need a few Lindell pillows to cushion the inevitable fall on Election Day.
Paul Doell, Hollywood
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