Case Study III:  Samuel Bice Johnson

 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 t
hese 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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