His Sidebar column in today's New York Times is, "Defendants Squeezed by Georgia’s Tight Budget." Here's the opening:
When the State of Georgia ran out of money to pay the lawyers for a man facing the death penalty, the prosecutor, of all people, had an idea. He asked the judge to appoint two overworked public defenders instead, identifying them by name.
The judge went along. The Georgia Supreme Court, by a 4-to-3 vote, endorsed the arrangement in March, saying the defendant, Jamie R. Weis, should have accepted the new lawyers to help solve the state’s budget impasse.
The adversary system does not ordinarily let prosecutors pick their opponents. Indeed, most states do not allow established relationships between lawyers and their clients to be interrupted for any but the most exceptional reasons.
Two states, Georgia and Louisiana, take a less sporting attitude, saying poor defendants may be forced to switch lawyers long after the case is under way and must take whomever the state can afford at the time.
The Georgia case is now before the Supreme Court, which will soon decide whether to hear it.
Norman S. Fletcher, who served as chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court from 2001 to 2005 and as an associate justice for more than a decade before that, said something had gone badly wrong in his state.
“If you’re going to seek capital punishment, you’re going to have to pay for it,” Mr. Fletcher said in an interview the other day. “If we’re going to have harsh laws, at least we should fulfill our constitutional obligations.”
As for the Weis case, he asked, “Why should the district attorney be involved in deciding who will represent people?”
In a brief supporting Mr. Weis, Mr. Fletcher and other leaders of the Georgia bar reminded the United States Supreme Court of what poor defendants in the state have had to put up with: “lawyers referring to their own clients by racial slurs, counsel distancing themselves from their clients by making it clear to the jury they were court-appointed and representing the client only because they had to, and counsel cross-examining a witness whose direct testimony counsel had missed because he was parking his car.”
In 2003, though, Georgia established a public defender system and a capital defender office meant to remedy problems like those. For a little while, Mr. Fletcher said, it seemed that Georgia was prepared to honor the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed lawyers to poor people accused of serious crimes.
Earlier coverage from Georgia begins with this post; related posts are in the indigent defense index.
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