How bad lawyering and an unforgiving law cost death row inmates

November 16, 2014 9:17 PM

Death by deadline.
posted by T.D. Strange (9 comments total)

For context, this is one of the first major stories from the Marshall Project, Neil Barsky and Bill Keller's non-profit journalism organization focusing on the criminal justice system. I look forward to seeing more.
posted by zachlipton at 12:09 AM on November 17, 2014

There's an excellent piece in the current New Yorker about an Alabama law which allows judges to reverse a jury's rejection of the death penalty. Often, the motivation seems to be that sending a "tough on crime" message helps the judge win re-election.

Seems to be readable for free on the website.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:51 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

State sanctioned killing? I have RTFA, but this is ISIS in translation right?
posted by Samuel Farrow at 1:11 AM on November 17, 2014

Harrowing. I read both articles and it's hard to discern which is the greater problem here - the moving deadline or incompetent counsel. I would argue that incompetent counsel is the greater problem, as giving these fools an extra year or two to file one petition wouldn't actually help, since they leave everything to the last minute anyway.
posted by stowaway at 8:02 AM on November 17, 2014

I read both articles and it's hard to discern which is the greater problem here - the moving deadline or incompetent counsel.

You forget the third problem, the prosecutors who refuse to admit that they could be incorrect and taking advantage of any technicality to see that the only thing served is their own win/loss record.
posted by Talez at 8:11 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

From the New Yorker article: "Jackson’s two court-appointed lawyers—general practitioners who had never served as lead counsel in a capital trial"

Alabama has a huge indigent defense problem. Only two counties in the state even have a public defender's office. Montgomery isn't in one of those counties. Everywhere else, private attorneys are appointed by the court, and their compensation is set by state law at $40/hour out of court and $60/hour in court, with a maximum total fee of $2000. Even for a capital murder defendant. That's about what attorneys in private practice charge for a simple DUI that doesn't even involve a jury.
posted by fogovonslack at 9:27 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

There's an excellent piece in the current New Yorker about an Alabama law which allows judges to reverse a jury's rejection of the death penalty. Often, the motivation seems to be that sending a "tough on crime" message helps the judge win re-election.

This is absolutely horrifying.

The judge, Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., had McMillian await trial on death row, as if a death sentence were a foregone conclusion, and relocated the trial from a county that was forty per cent black to an overwhelmingly white one. The trial lasted a day and a half. Twelve defense witnesses swore that McMillian was at home on the day of the crime, hosting a fish fry. There was no physical evidence. Nevertheless, the jury found McMillian guilty based on the testimony of three state’s witnesses, two of whom reported seeing McMillian’s truck at the dry cleaner’s around the time that Morrison was strangled and shot. The jury recommended life in prison. In overriding this decision, Judge Key remarked that McMillian deserved to be executed for the “brutal killing of a young lady in the first full flower of adulthood.” The Judge’s confidence was misplaced—McMillian was exonerated after his appellate lawyers discovered that prosecutors had withheld evidence and that the state’s star witnesses had lied. By the time McMillian was set free, in 1993, he had spent six years on death row.

What the fuck?

More than twenty override decisions have involved white defendants, but in some of these cases, too, the judge’s reasoning has had a racial subtext. In 2000, a judge ordering the death of a white defendant noted that if he hadn’t overridden the jury he’d have “sentenced three black people to death and no white people.” The comment has been interpreted as an attempt to cover up racial disparities in the death penalty. Race is “a real consideration here,” Douglas Johnstone, a retired Alabama Supreme Court justice, told me. Some judges, he said, “want to make sure they put enough white people to death to hang on to the prerogative” of override.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Rehnquist's legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp continues to fuck people. It's like the gift that keeps on giving long after that bastard died.
posted by Talez at 9:36 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

But Rouse's final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse's lawyers had just one year after his initial state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court.

Just how toxic the combination of Newt Gingrich's "Contract [on] America" and Bill Clinton was slowly reveals itself over time to be much, much more than originally thought.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:57 AM on November 17, 2014

“Sometimes you just have to put ’em down.”

Our elected judiciary at work. The best money can buy.
posted by fogovonslack at 11:14 AM on November 17, 2014