I’ve heard anecdotally from lawyer friends that despite how fucked up the US justice system is in so many ways, one bright spot is the lengths to which they’ll

I’ve heard anecdotally from lawyer friends that despite how fucked up the US justice system is in so many ways, one bright spot is the lengths to which they’ll go to find interpreters. One Guatemalan defendant who natively spoke a Mayan language had to go through a chain of three court-appointed interpreters: one from his language to a different, more widely-spoken Mayan language, one to go from that to Spanish, and one from Spanish to English. He told my friend (his lawyer) something like: “this is amazing; in Guatemala they’d have just told me ‘sorry, the national language is Spanish’ and I’ve had been out of luck!” I don’t believe it would be legally possible in the US to convict a monolingual Khmer speaker of a crime without providing an interpreter, in Miami or anywhere else.