A modern history of legal representation in death penalty cases

 
We will take a few anecdotal examples of representation to identify  systemic problems that have plagued this punishment.  A punishment which has historically accomplished little more than allowing society to vent its retaliatory attitude and substitute a false solution for the solutions to real problems.

 Case study I:  Abraham Beard - - pre-Furman

 
In 1954, in a typical death penalty case of that era, a lawyer represented, from trial until execution, Abraham Beard, an African American teenager convicted and sentenced to death in a segregated courtroom by an all white Leon County, Florida jury for an alleged rape of a white person.  After an unsuccessful direct appeal to the Supreme Court of Florida and an equally futile plea for clemency to the Governor, the young attorney filed a petition for a stay of execution in the Supreme Court of the United States -- a procedure that he did not understand and for which there was no organization to turn for guidance.
 The night before the execution, the attorney received a telephone call from a law clerk to United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.  Justice Black was considering the petition for a stay of execution, and if the attorney could give his assurance that a legitimate constitutional issue would be raised in his petition for writ of certiorari, then Justice Black would grant a stay.  "No," the attorney replied; no, he could not assure Justice Black that a constitutional issue existed in this case of a 17 year old African American adolescent sentenced to death in a segregated courtroom by an all white jury in the heart of the Jim Crow South for the alleged rape of a white woman.  The stay was denied.
 The next morning the attorney traveled to the prison to visit with Abraham Beard and to witness the execution.  He told his client of the phone call from Justice Black's law clerk and assured Abraham Beard that in making his statement to Justice Black's clerk he had done the right thing.  Mr. Beard's response is unrecorded.  Abraham Beard was one of three young African American men to be executed by the State of Florida that day.  A prison official told the attorney that things would be easier on both the attorney and Abraham Beard if Beard was electrocuted first.   The prison official enumerated the benefits of Beard being executed first. The attorney agreed.  That was his final act as counsel for Abraham Beard.  Counsel for the other two persons executed that day terminated their representation earlier and did not attend the executions.
 The representation of Beard was typical of the representation of the condemned before LDF developed a strategy and a system for the legal battle against the death penalty in the 1960's.  Tragically, the representation afforded Abraham Beard exceeded that afforded to most of his contemporaries.
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