One More Arrow in the DP Abolition Quiver

A few choice excerpts:

Hill and his team work out of an office in the Capital Defenders’ headquarters, in downtown Atlanta, in a mock courtroom that is normally used for training. The prosecution has indicated that it may call as many as four hundred witnesses, and in Hill’s office are twenty-seven black binders, spanning eight feet of floor space, containing witness statements and other evidence gathered by the district attorney. The prosecution has also produced more than forty thousand pages of other material, and there are more than four hundred hours of tapes of telephone calls that Nichols has made from jail. On the wall are twenty sheets of yellow paper, each one representing a location relevant to the case. ***

Nichols was prepared to plead guilty to every count in the indictment and accept a sentence of life in prison if Howard agreed to abandon his quest for the death penalty.

Howard said no. As an elected official, he had little to lose by taking a hard line against one of the most notorious criminals in the country. The long wait to bring Nichols to trial has been frustrating for Howard, who works in an office in the old courthouse, five floors beneath the murder scene. Defending his decision to reject Hill’s plea offer, Howard told me, “My belief is that punishment is a question that should be decided by the community. It is not appropriate to kill four people and outline for the citizens what his punishment should be. I don’t think the defendant should choose his own punishment.” ***

Florida caps legal fees in death-penalty cases at fifteen thousand dollars, and South Carolina and Oklahoma allocate twenty-five thousand. Expenses for experts, however, often push the total cost in those states to six figures; in Georgia the average death-penalty defense costs about three hundred thousand dollars, and so it is not surprising that a case as complicated as Nichols’s has cost a great deal more. ***

Last month, Fulton County allocated a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for a psychiatric evaluation of Nichols and for other defense experts, but the standoff over the other costs of his defense remains unresolved. On January 18th, the Georgia council asked Judge Fuller to assign the case back to the state Capital Defenders. Hill would not comment, but Stephen Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, called the move “a gross violation of the right to counsel.” Both Judge Fuller and Nichols’s defense team have argued that changing lawyers at this point would violate Nichols’s rights. Ironically, the refusal of state authorities to continue to pay Nichols’s legal fees has only increased the chances that he will avoid the death penalty. (“If this case was properly funded, it would have been over a year ago,” Fuller told me.) And, in the meantime, the Georgia council’s financial problems are beginning to affect other trials. In November, a judge in a murder case in rural Pike County removed two private attorneys because the council could no longer afford to pay them.

Toobin

Sheesh!?

I almost missed this important item.

PD Stuff is having a vote on best PD blogs here. That's the best public defender blogs of the year awards.

This is the spam for it: (I am so left out, except he does have me on his BIG FEED LIST! Very kindly, so he is forgiven)

Recently there have been a slew of awards for legal blogs, the most recent being the Blawg Review Awards. The only thing the various awards had in common is that they completely ignored public defender blogs. It is something public defenders are used to, of course, being what one PD blogger described as "the dirt of the profession."

Last February I began the Public Defender Stuff blog to publish news involving public/indigent defense, and to bring together the incredibly diverse blogs of public/indigent defenders. That led to the creation of the PD Blog Guide and a daily listing of every PD blogger who has posted since the previous day's listing. Now, in response to what Blawg Review has already described as an unfortunate oversight, Public Defender Stuff is hosting the inaugural Public Defender Blog Awards.

If you could find it in your heart to throw some poor bloggers a bone, would it be possible to mention the awards on Sentencing Law and Policy? The link above will take you (and your readers) to the ballot, and voting is open until January 5. Thank you very much for your consideration.