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indigent

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indigent

1) n. a person so poor and needy that he/she cannot provide the necessities of life (food, clothing, decent shelter) for himself/herself. 2) n. one without sufficient income to afford a lawyer for defense in a criminal case. If the court finds a person is an indigent, the court must appoint a public defender or other attorney to represent him/her. This Constitutional right of counsel for the indigent was determined by Gideon v. Wainright in 1963, when a penciled letter from a prisoner came to the attention of prominent Washington attorney Abe Fortas, who carried the case to the Supreme Court for free. Fortas later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. 3) adj. referring to a person who is very poor and needy.

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References in periodicals archive
For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affl uence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.'
c) the criteria that apply for identifying the target group rely on absolute poverty and indigence lines established at extremely low levels (USD 1 or 2 per day), which tend to hide the real magnitude and severity of destitution and reduce the number of potential beneficiaries;
Leonardo Burgos Espinal, 42, a citizen of the Dominican Republic who was living in the country illegally, will not pay restitution because of indigence. He has six children ranging in age from 1 to 19 and a sick mother in the Dominican Republic, said his lawyer, John S.
Wu's book shows that Asians--her book focuses mostly on Chinese and Japanese--have traveled a long, hard road in the U.S., facing slurs, housing and job discrimination, indigence and the persistent feeling that they had to prove their loyalty.
But as Duerfahrd writes of his encounters, a pattern of themes and contexts begins to emerge: the performers are presenting themselves as vagabonds and working, very much like the characters, with the textual indigence, with the reader, or the onlooker, hip-deep in the aesthetics of poverty and despair.
However, despite the best intentions to support the work of talented practitioners from Iran and the Arab world, the exhibition also promotes the mythical discourse of the personal story, a traditionally anthropologized, benevolent, and humanistic narrative of "other" people and places that masks the postcolonial politics of indigence inherent to such museological endeavors.
Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953.
Like a one-word refrain or a simple, insistent gesture, the difference between excess and indigence produces precarious and resonant images.
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