And justice for all?

. An administrator of criminal-case appeals in Louisiana committed suicide in 2007, partly (according to his suicide note) because of guilt that, for 13 years, he had complied with a judge's order to deny, sight-unseen, all appeals filed by defendants who were acting without lawyers. (Under state law, only death row convicts get assistance for appeals; all others, even convicted murderers, either fend for themselves or forfeit the appeal right, no matter how indigent.) According to the administrator (the extent of whose claims are still being investigated by the state Supreme Court), none of the supervisory judges involved in denying the 2,400 appeals ever read a single word in them.