The Public Defender
Going back to some common refrains that I’ve heard about the death penalty and our criminal justice system in general….Before I came here, I assumed that every state had a public defender's office to represent accused criminals who couldn't afford their own attorney. I think most people make the same assumption. Everyone has a right to an attorney, so it seems only natural that a public defender would represent a defendant if they couldn’t hire their own lawyer.
Well, it turns out I was wrong. Alabama does not have a public defender’s office. Instead, private attorneys are appointed by the court to represent indigent defendants. Until 1999, attorneys that were appointed to represent capital punishment defendants at trial received a maximum of $2000 to defend their client. Today, the cap has been removed for trial attorneys (though the billing rate per hour is still pretty meager), but not for attorneys who represent death row clients on appeal. In contrast to Alabama’s system of court-appointed attorneys, states that have public defender offices provide funding for the office that is then matched by the federal government. Public defenders work on representing poor defendants 100% of the time, unlike the private attorneys who represent indigent defendants in Alabama.
Alabama’s system has several consequences that necessitate organizations like Equal Justice Initiative, the organization I’m interning at this summer, to actively seek reform of the state criminal justice system while extending their own resources to capacity in order to represent clients on death row. First of all, the attorneys that are appointed to represent indigent defendants have an incentive to spend as little time as possible representing each defendant so that they can earn more money. This means that the quality of their counsel is extremely poor. Criminal indigent defense attorneys are also usually not the “cream of the crop” so-to-speak because if they had regular, paying clients than they wouldn’t have to accept the discounted fees offered by the state to represent indigent defendants.
Not surprisingly, 70 percent of the people presently on death row were convicted when the fees for indigent defense lawyers were capped at $2,000. Partly as a result of this astonishing statistic, ineffective counsel is one of the most common arguments that’s made on appeal to try and secure a new trial. In one case that I’m working on now for instance, our client’s attorney was only given about $100 to hire a forensic expert to testify on his client's behalf. The forensic expert had to analyze bullets found at the crime scene, which turned out to be the main evidence against the defendant. Because of the meager allowance that he got from the state, the defendant’s attorney wound up hiring an “expert” who did not know how to use the machine to analyze bullet markings, and who was blind in one eye. Today, this client sits on death row, despite extraordinarily strong evidence - including evidence that the bullets don’t match his gun - that he is actually innocent of the crime committed.
There’s a saying that it’s better to be rich and guilty than innocent and poor. That’s especially true in Alabama.
Well, it turns out I was wrong. Alabama does not have a public defender’s office. Instead, private attorneys are appointed by the court to represent indigent defendants. Until 1999, attorneys that were appointed to represent capital punishment defendants at trial received a maximum of $2000 to defend their client. Today, the cap has been removed for trial attorneys (though the billing rate per hour is still pretty meager), but not for attorneys who represent death row clients on appeal. In contrast to Alabama’s system of court-appointed attorneys, states that have public defender offices provide funding for the office that is then matched by the federal government. Public defenders work on representing poor defendants 100% of the time, unlike the private attorneys who represent indigent defendants in Alabama.
Alabama’s system has several consequences that necessitate organizations like Equal Justice Initiative, the organization I’m interning at this summer, to actively seek reform of the state criminal justice system while extending their own resources to capacity in order to represent clients on death row. First of all, the attorneys that are appointed to represent indigent defendants have an incentive to spend as little time as possible representing each defendant so that they can earn more money. This means that the quality of their counsel is extremely poor. Criminal indigent defense attorneys are also usually not the “cream of the crop” so-to-speak because if they had regular, paying clients than they wouldn’t have to accept the discounted fees offered by the state to represent indigent defendants.
Not surprisingly, 70 percent of the people presently on death row were convicted when the fees for indigent defense lawyers were capped at $2,000. Partly as a result of this astonishing statistic, ineffective counsel is one of the most common arguments that’s made on appeal to try and secure a new trial. In one case that I’m working on now for instance, our client’s attorney was only given about $100 to hire a forensic expert to testify on his client's behalf. The forensic expert had to analyze bullets found at the crime scene, which turned out to be the main evidence against the defendant. Because of the meager allowance that he got from the state, the defendant’s attorney wound up hiring an “expert” who did not know how to use the machine to analyze bullet markings, and who was blind in one eye. Today, this client sits on death row, despite extraordinarily strong evidence - including evidence that the bullets don’t match his gun - that he is actually innocent of the crime committed.
There’s a saying that it’s better to be rich and guilty than innocent and poor. That’s especially true in Alabama.
posted by Ariel Glasner @ 10:22 AM
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