Nifty move

This is cut and pasted from the authoritative 538.com. I added the links to the guys.

1 lawyer
Michael Barrett, the director of Missouri’s public defender system, says he has a big funding problem. In an unusual letter to the governor, Jay Nixon, Barrett said the state’s public defender system is ranked 49th in the U.S., that its budget has been repeatedly cut, and that he can’t hire enough attorneys for the department to do its job under the current funding level. Luckily, section 600.042.5 of state law allows him to essentially pick any member of the Missouri bar to defend a case if the need arises. So, he’s assigned a case to a prominent Missouri attorney, Gov. Jay Nixon, to prove his point. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]