Samuel Bice
Johnson, an African American person, was charged with killing a white
Mississippi Highway Patrol officer. He was provided two
court-appointed lawyers who were paid a total of $2,000 to represent
him.
After his
death sentence was affirmed on direct appeal, the New York corporate law
firm of Cahill, Gordon and Reindel volunteered to represent him pro bono
in a habeas corpus proceeding. Twenty-nine lawyers and 27 summer
associates worked on the case for 7,686 hours at a cost of 1.7 million
dollars. Certainly, there is much to be said for the outstanding work of
these people. Floyd Abrams, a partner in the firm and one of the
nation's leading civil rights attorneys, later argued the case in the
United States Supreme Court. After the court
vacated Johnson's death sentence, Abrams philosophized:
Think if the
resources poured into this case at the end had been poured in at the
beginning . . . Suppose instead of two young lawyers having a total of
two thousand dollars for everything, they'd had twenty-five thousand,
fifty thousand, one hundred thousand. It might well be that
instead of the more than one and a half million dollars we've spent on
this, none of this would have been required.
Abrams
intended this comment to be an indictment of the grossly inadequate fees
that are paid to court appointed counsel in Mississippi but it also
raises a serious question about a strategy that requires many lawyers to
donate their talent, time and resources to represent poor people in
death penalty cases on the back end. Many more lives would be
saved if lawyers like Abrams represented capital defendants or even
acted as consultants or resource providers for the appointed lawyers
"at the beginning." The stars of the civil rights bar, famous
legal scholars and partners in silk stocking Wall Street law firms
usually enter a capital case in collateral proceedings after underpaid
court appointed solo general practitioners represented the defendant at
trial and on direct appeal.
There are
also dozens of creative young attorneys on the staffs of
government-funded capital resource centers who could save more lives if
they became involved in cases at the pretrial stage instead of in
collateral proceedings if these lawyers were adequately trained and
assisted. The interpersonal skills of these lawyers are
desperately needed to assist capital defendants in making the few
decisions. That are available for them to make. As many as 70% of
the people on death row could have pleaded their cases to sentences that
would have saved their lives. Lawyers who should be applying their
talents on the front end, where it can be beneficial, are writing habeas
corpus petitions that are little more than obituaries for death row
inmates.
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