According to one of the most high-profile anti-DP lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, inadequate legal representation is the rule and not the exception.
Most inmates on death row are poor, which means they are appointed an attorney by the state. More often than not, the state has unlimited legal resources, whereas the public defender typically earns far less than lawyers working for the DA's office. The courts tend to know this, but it's not really taken seriously.
Stafford-Smith has pointed out that some truly surreal and Kafka-esque moments happen in capital cases. Among some of the lines heard in court are things like:
"Your honour, may I have a moment to compose myself, because I have never been in a courtroom before?"
That statement was uttered by a second-year law student who had been appointed as a public defender. It gets even sillier, when one notable case saw the defender go to the tank with his client for being drunk in court. Another example was the case of Edward Earl Johnson, executed in 1987, despite the fact that his lawyer was deaf, old, very sleepy, and as a result missed much of the important testimony. Another southern public defender referred to his client as 'the nigger' throughout the trial. And to underline the point made above by CCADP, Jimmy Dennis' trial lawyer met him for a scant several minutes just before his case went to trial.
So it's not remarkable to have poor representation, and if we analyse the figures, it's a compelling argument that that if you'd had decent representation then you wouldn't be on death row anyway.
Clive Stafford-Smith performed an important comparitive study of this factor of poor defense, in which he showed two groups of defendents, one group having access only to the regular public defense, and one group having competent professional defense. He showed that adequate defense is almost always all it takes to convince a jury not to execute a defendent.
Ed
I live in Britain and am writing to a prisoner on death rown in Texas. He has told me that he is trying to argue that he received inadequate legal representation.
