Mississippi Burning: seeking closure in Civil Rights murders

[shereads]

What about a screening process to eliminate those who have strong or evidentiary bias in the case?

That brings us right back to wear we are now. If you can afford a jury selection specialist, you can abuse the system and screen for those who DO have a strong bias in the case. By the same token, if your public defender is overburdened by his case load, he has limited time to spend screening jurors.

I don't think this is necessarily feasible... but to be sure, we'd have to have some sort of objective sense of how much time and resources are available at present to each. I think we'd find that public defense has far more money than private, on average, but that wouldn't be a fair statistic by itself.

You'd be wrong, from what I've read. Statistically, in Florida at least, a public defender spends a total of thirteen hours on a murder case. That's from his first interview with the defendant to the paperwork after the fact.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by shereads
That brings us right back to wear we are now. If you can afford a jury selection specialist, you can abuse the system and screen for those who DO have a strong bias in the case.

But, if you don't put in place a weeding-out system, you have a great chance of having problems with runaway verdicts and hung juries.

You'd be wrong, from what I've read. Statistically, in Florida at least, a public defender spends a total of thirteen hours on a murder case. That's from his first interview with the defendant to the paperwork after the fact.

Granted, but a public defender has the resources of a government behind them... private defenders don't. And while some firms are wealthy enough to handle a bigger budget than is likely to be approved to a public defender, the very existance of non-profit lawyers brings to bear the situation where resources are not as abundant as public defenders. Past that, again, criminal cases are a small subset--despite the high profile.

I'd be curious about the numbers for the whole of the law before I could say, first, which is certainly better funded and possessed of more resources or, second, if the difference has a significance.

 

[shereads]

from a Natinional Catholic Reporter death penalty forum:

When justice is blind drunk.

In 1989, in response to litigation from the center, the Georgia Supreme Court required that a person accused of a capital crime receive adequate representation. But the state has done little to implement its own law, Bright said, and poor clients are still defended by attorneys who specialize in "title searches, wills and divorces."

In his June testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, favoring the passage of the Innocence Protection Act, Bright cited case after case in which the defense counsel failed to represent a client well.

"In at least 4 cases in Georgia, counsel referred to their clients before the jury with a racial slur. A woman in Alabama was represented by a lawyer so drunk that her trial had to be suspended for a day, and the lawyer sent to jail to sober up. The next day, both lawyer and client were produced from jail and trial resumed. Defense lawyers in Alabama and Missouri cases had sexual relations with clients facing the death penalty. In far too many cases, lawyers defending capital cases were impaired by alcohol, drugs or infirmity," Bright said.

Yes, I know this is worst-case scenario, but it illustrates the enormity of the problem faced by poor and non-white criminal defendants in parts of the land of the free. Imagine being indicated for a murder you didn't commit, unable to pay for a lawyer of your own, and how you'd feel if you realized the p.d. you had drawn was biased against you, and had a drinking problem. Not much you can do about it, considering that you have no power to begin with.

As with so many of the things us liberals rant about, there is at least a partial solution and it's a financial one. Fund the public defense system with the enthusiasm we would if each of us believed that we or our own children might someday be at its mercy.