Ed Monahan, Kentucky’s public advocate and chief defender, describes public defenders as “the pack mules of the system”. Current statistics are hard to come by, but a 2008 study by the American Bar Association estimated that just 2.5% of the roughly $200bn spent on criminal justice by states and local government every year went on public defenders. Up to 90% of criminal defendants in the US qualify as indigent, and some public defenders are working 150 cases with a budget of just $350 for each. No wonder, then, if the scales of justice tilt against poor peopel. “Pack mules can carry a lot. But you put one more box on an overburdened mule, and it won’t be able to function,” says Monahan. In the first of a three-part series, the Guardian and the Marshall Project examine how a cornerstone principle of the justice system has been eroded to breaking point.  The human toll of America’s public defender crisis  Brock Turner, the Stanford student who was released from jail last after serving three months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, returned home to Ohio to a threatening reception that included activists with assault rifles gathered to protest his relatively light punishment. “With an extremely lenient sentence, he can think ‘I can get away with this,’” said Daniel Hardin, armed with an assault rifle. “The message we want to send is … ‘If you try this again, we will shoot you.’”  Armed anarchists rally at Brock Turner’s home: ‘Try this again, we’ll shoot you’  Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump kicked off the final two months of the campaign with new efforts to drive each other’s poll numbers down. In North Carolina, Trump attacked Clinton’s “military adventurism” and said “her conduct is disqualifying”. Clinton delivered a focused attack on her opponent’s refusal to release his tax returns. “The scams, the frauds, the questionable relationships – his tax returns tell a story that the American people deserve and need to know,” Clinton said. “He clearly has something to hide. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we’re getting better guesses.” She vowed to maintain the tax theme until election day.  Donald Trump fires up crowd with attack on Clinton’s ‘disqualifying conduct’  Lee Sherman, 82, once played for the Dallas Texans football team and drove for a Nascar team. He also worked for a petrochemical company, Pittsburgh Plate Glass. “All my co-workers from back then are dead; most died young,” says. Men like Sherman paradoxically now hold the key to Donald Trump’s success, writes Arlie Hochschild. Meanwhile, in Floyd County, Kentucky, Darvin Burchet used to run coal mines before they closed “because of Obama’s war on coal”. The 79-year-old proudly wears a Make America Great Again hat. “Society has fallen apart and the economy has gone to hell,” he reasons. “Finding a good worker now is almost impossible. People here lack pride. Can’t fully blame them.”  How the ‘Great Paradox’ of American politics holds the secret to Trump’s success  Pride and pain in Trump country: ‘We all grew up poor, but we had a community’  Green party candidate Jill Stein, arguing for herself and Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, says an overwhelming majority of Americans want to hear them debate the main party candidates. “Presidential debates should be an opportunity for the American people to decide the direction of our nation,” she says, accusing the Commission on Presidential Debates of being a “two-party cartel posing as a public service ‘commission’”.  It is undemocratic to exclude me and Gary Johnson from presidential debates  Last week, Megan Carpentier decided to spend an entire day getting her news solely from Facebook’s trending topics. Surely the wisdom, culture and intellectual curiosity of the people of the world – the great global public – would be reflected in this collection of their favourite diverse and engaging news stories? Here’s what she found.  What the human race cares about, as viewed by Facebook’s trending topics  As he prepares to release his autobiography Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen has opened up about a long battle with depression. He describes its onset as a “freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track”. Referring to his father’s history with the illness, Springsteen, 66, told Vanity Fair: “You don’t know the illness’s parameters ... Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?”  Bruce Springsteen says years of depression left him ‘crushed’  Kamala Lopez crossed the nation to speak to hundreds of women to argue that full equality under the law must be enshrined in the constitution. The responses have now been compiled into a documentary, Equal Means Equal. Writing shortly after the death of Phyllis Schlafly, who successfully worked to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, Lopez says that no matter how uncomfortable it is, the new generation must be informed that “society has always seen women as less, treated them with less respect and dignity and exploited them and their bodies for profit at every turn”. It will always be thus, she says, “unless we transform the status quo of the nation.”  Surely it’s time American women’s equality was added to the constitution  Apple may announce a reboot of its iWatch today, a product that has so far proved a disappointment, with shipments of the device declining 55% in the second quarter. A new report suggests things are only getting worse for wearable technology, with the share of people using the devices declining from 21% in 2015 to 14% this year. According to market research company IDC, the entire smartwatch market is down by nearly a third. Are customers waiting for Apple’s next generation of iWatch or abandoning the sector altogether?  Can the new Apple Watch save a weakening wearables market?  A new drug that “wakes up” the immune system to attack cancer has extended the lives of people with metastatic pancreatic cancer and has no side-effects, raising hopes for a new and powerful tool against the most intractable form of the disease. The drug, IMM-101, is considered groundbreaking because pancreatic cancer that has spread to other parts of the body usually kills within a few months.  New drug ‘wakes up’ immune system to fight one of deadliest cancers
Brock Turner returns home to armed protesters; Jill Stein argues to be included in presidential debates; Bruce Springsteen describes battle with depression