Whatever Happened to Right to Speedy Trial and Assistance of Counsel

January 2, 2009

Long Held in Capital Case, Man Sues to Get a Lawyer
By ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — A man awaiting trial in a Georgia prison has spent the last eight months without a lawyer while prosecutors prepare a death penalty case against him, a lawsuit brought on his behalf says.

The suit, filed for Jamie R. Weis by four Atlanta lawyers, calls the lapse in legal representation “an unprecedented deprivation of counsel in modern times.”
It names as defendants two leaders of Georgia’s public defender system.

“There’s nothing more fundamental and more important to somebody facing the death penalty than adequate counsel,” said one of the lawyers, Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

“The idea that somebody would go even one week without a lawyer is unthinkable.”

Mr. Weis, 31, who is charged with murder, was initially represented by two lawyers in private practice, the suit says, but the state’s public defender system did not have the money to pay them, and they were removed from the case in November 2007.

Two public defense lawyers were then assigned. But they too were removed, having objected that they did not have the time or resources for a capital case.

In April, the suit says, Mr. Weis’s original two lawyers were reassigned to the case upon agreement of Gerald P. Word, acting director of the Georgia capital defender’s office, that Mack Crawford, director of the office’s parent, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, would sign a contract authorizing their payment. But Mr. Crawford never did so, the suit maintains.

Mr. Crawford and Mr. Word could not be reached at their offices late Wednesday or again on the holiday Thursday. They told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday that they had not yet seen the suit, and declined to comment further.

James E. Coleman Jr., an expert in criminal law at Duke Law School, who is not involved in the suit, said the absence of a defense lawyer for any period of time created an unfair advantage for prosecutors. Defense investigations should begin immediately after a suspect’s arrest, Professor Coleman said, so witnesses’ memories do not fade and evidence does not disappear.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “I think the state has violated this man’s constitutional rights and undermined his chances of receiving a fair trial.”

Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School who supports the death penalty, said the lawsuit raised worrisome questions about the fairness of Mr. Weis’s trial.

“When it comes to the death penalty, money should never be the issue,” Professor Blecker said. “In this story, money seems to have become the issue, and that’s what’s so troubling.”

Georgia’s public defender system has long struggled for financing from the state legislature, especially in recent years with more than $2 million spent in the highly publicized case of Brian G. Nichols, who was sentenced last month to life in prison for killing four people in his escape from an Atlanta courthouse in 2005.

Mr. Weis is charged with murdering Catherine King in her home in Pike County, south of Atlanta, in 2006. He has a history of mental illness, which Mr. Bright, one of the lawyers who sued on his behalf, said made his lack of legal representation all the more troubling.

“For Jamie, this whole situation has been confusing and depressing and has really aggravated his mental condition,” Mr. Bright said. “He has been left twisting in the wind for eight months. It’s just unconscionable.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Do you think that the state should continue to bring a death penalty case against him? Whaat options, if any, can negate the unconstitutionality of what has been allowed to happen?