Steven Singer, a public defender involved in overhauling New Orleans' indigent defense system after Hurricane Katrina, sits down for this interview segment from Yale's course Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage, taught by Stephen Bright. Singer describes how the storm exposed and worsened an already collapsing public defense system, in which underfunded lawyers handled overwhelming caseloads with little oversight. He walks through the reforms pushed through in the years after Katrina, including efforts to set caseload limits and secure adequate funding for defense counsel, and recounts the pushback these changes met from some sitting judges who resisted ceding control over how cases moved through their courtrooms. The conversation stays grounded in specifics from Orleans Parish rather than abstract policy, making the case that institutional resistance, not just money, is what keeps public defense broken.