Today's Denver Post reports, "Suit filed over Colorado death penalty appeals process." It's written by John Ingold.
The Colorado State Public Defender's office has sued in federal court challenging the state's unified system of death-penalty appeals.
The lawsuit, filed last week, comes in connection with the case of Sir Mario Owens, who was convicted in 2008 and and sentenced to die for killing Javad Marshall-Fields and Vivian Wolfe. Marshall-Fields had been scheduled to testify against Owens in a separate murder case.
Owens' death-penalty case is the first to proceed under a unified state appellate process, in which conviction and post-conviction reviews are handled in a single appeal and can take no longer than two years to resolve.
Previously, the reviews were handled one after the other and could take many years.
The state legislature adopted the unified process in 1997 in an effort to speed up death-penalty appeals. For instance, Nathan Dunlap, who is currently in the midst of a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in his last legally guaranteed appeal, has been on death row for 16 years.
Under a non-unified system, defendants have two avenues for appeal. The first, known as a direct appeal, analyzes the validity of a conviction or a sentence based on the information presented at trial. The second, a post-conviction appeal, argues such issues as whether a defendant received competent representation and can also introduce new evidence.
In the unified process, those avenues are taken up at the same time, though different attorneys are assigned to the two parts.
The public defender's office argues that the unified process creates inherent conflicts of interest by pitting the lawyers on the two prongs of his appeal against one another. Lawyers on the post-conviction side, for instance, may want to make arguments that undermine the direct appeal side.
Texas changed its post-conviction review process to a similar system in 1995.
Earlier coverage from Colorado begins at the link. Related posts are in the post-conviction review and state legislation indexes.
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