Marcia Coyle writes, "Ga. Murder Case Shines Spotlight on Nation's Indigent Defense Systems."
Jamie Weis, accused in 2006 of killing an elderly neighbor, had two state-appointed lawyers defending him from capital murder charges for more than a year.
When the state of Georgia ran out of money to pay them, the trial judge removed them, appointing public defenders who spent nearly two years trying to withdraw.
Weis, in county jail now for four years, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to delve into what he claims is a breakdown of Georgia's public defender system.
Weis wants the justices to make clear that "lawyers are not fungible," said lead counsel Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
Indigent defendants, Bright said, have the same Sixth Amendment right to continuity of counsel once the attorney-client relationship is established as do those defendants with the means to hire lawyers. That right, he and his colleagues contend, was violated in the Weis case, when two appointed attorneys were removed because the state ran out of money to pay them. "I think we have the complete breakdown in this case," Bright said. "The legislature just didn't put enough money into the system and it ran out of gas."
The case is not about a breakdown in the system, countered Assistant District Attorney Robert Smith of Fayetteville, Ga. Weis is responsible for most of the delay, he said, and the Georgia Supreme Court in March correctly rejected his constitutional claims. "This case is about bringing Catherine King's killer to justice and giving the people of Pike County the opportunity to hear it," he said. "That's what this case is about."
Weis' petition for review comes at a time when an increasing number of legal challenges are being made to underfunded and overburdened state indigent defense systems. Several lawsuits are pending in Georgia, and courts in New York and Michigan recently have given the green light to class actions against those state systems for alleged failures to provide adequate legal representation.
Georgia's problems are long-standing. Twenty years ago, The National Law Journal, in a six-month investigation of the defense of capital murder defendants in six Southern states, including Georgia, found poorly trained and underpaid lawyers in a hodgepodge of standardless systems with actual disincentives to effective representation.
Georgia, however, seemed to turn a corner in 2003 when the governor signed into law the Georgia Indigent Defense Act. The law created a statewide network of public defender offices and an Office of Georgia Capital Defender to represent death penalty cases.
But state funding has never kept pace with the need, triggering the recent round of lawsuits. "All of the promise we had from this new public defender system is just evaporating," Bright said.
And:
In the U.S. Supreme Court, Bright argues this is not a counsel-of-choice issue but an issue of continuity of counsel. Only Georgia, Louisiana and two federal circuits -- the 2nd and 6th -- refuse to recognize that, once the attorney-client bond of trust and confidence has been established, counsel cannot be removed absent some extreme circumstances. "There's a whole string of [lower court] cases saying, unless the lawyer is just disabled or engages in contemptuous behavior, you can't sever the relationship," Bright said. "This wasn't about Weis' seeking preference of counsel but opposing counsel moving to remove counsel. I think the Court will be offended by that."
Criminal law scholar Joshua Dressler of Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law and ethics scholar Monroe Freedman of Hofstra University School of Law said Bright's distinction is an important and valid one. Freedman is more emphatic, saying, "It is so clear this was a violation of fundamental rights that it should be the easiest of cases and should never have occurred in the first place."
Earlier coverage of the case begins here. Earlier coverage of Georgia-specific indigent defense issues is here; related articles are in the indigent defense index.
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