Poor death row inmates in Alabama don’t have lawyers. And that’s really too bad, but to expect otherwise would be one of your hippie liberal pipe-dreams:
Nobody much likes the fact that Alabama does not provide indigent death row inmates with lawyers.
”Perhaps, in a perfect world, every inmate would have a lawyer at the ready at all times,” the state’s attorney general told a federal appeals court in a brief defending the practice last year. ”But we live in the real world.”
Three judges on that court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, also made sympathetic remarks about a utopian alternate reality in which prisoners about to be executed might actually be provided with lawyers.
”If we lived in a perfect world, which we do not, we would like to see the inmates obtain the relief they seek,” Judge Joel F. Dubina wrote. The court unanimously rejected a class action suit from inmates asking for lawyers.
No, it’s not that there just aren’t lawyers — it’s that the state of Alabama refuses to provide attorneys to death row inmates who can’t afford them.
Alabama has about 200 people on death row. Few of them, presumably, have legal training or money to hire lawyers.
Yet if they are to challenge their convictions or sentences, they must master the hyper-technical intricacies of Alabama’s rules of criminal procedure, conduct investigations from behind prison walls and prepare and file their own petitions for post-conviction relief. The deadline is one year, after which Alabama courts close their doors.
The attorney general’s office cuts the inmates no slack, seeking and getting dismissals of the prisoners’ petitions for all manner of procedural shortcomings.
And that isn’t the only roadblock they throw up:
If a petition survives, a judge has the option but not the obligation to appoint a lawyer. Even then, there is a catch: the cap on compensation is $1,000, which will buy you an hour or two of a New York lawyer’s time but must pay for the hundreds of hours of work that goes into a habeas petition. A properly prepared petition is based on painstaking review of the trial transcript and appellate record, witness interviews, other investigation and extensive legal research.
Lawyers put years into their death penalty cases. They spend hundreds and even thousands of hours on them. $1,000? No matter how good-hearted a lawyer is, chances are they still have to pay their own bills. And $1,000 for years of work isn’t going to do it.
An Alabama death row inmate lucky enough to get a lawyer will have one who is willing to work for less than the minimum wage.
Alabama responds by pointing to the quality of the volunteer lawyers who do often take on capital cases there.
”The overwhelming majority of Alabama death-row inmates enjoy the assistance of qualified (and often über-qualified) counsel in collaterally attacking their convictions and sentences,” the state’s lawyers told the appeals court. (Über-lawyers are apparently the sort who usually work for more than the minimum wage.)
That is pretty circular. Since good lawyers occasionally agree to fill the gap created by Alabama’s refusal to provide any lawyers, the argument goes, the state may continue to provide no lawyers.
It’s repulsive logic. There are certainly some extremely talented attorneys who dedicate their time and efforts to defending death row inmates in Alabama — among them are Bryan Stevenson, Anthony Amsterdam and Randy Susskind of the NYU School of Law Capital Defender Clinic and the many good people of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama — but these good people do not negate the responsibility of the state to provide for the adequate defense of its citizens, particularly when those citizens are facing a criminal penalty which will take their lives.
And then there’s the blatant racism in the application of capital punishment. Consider:
-African-Americans make up 12 percent of the population, but 40 percent of death row inmates, and one-third of people executed since 1977.
-“Blacks and whites were the victims of these murders in almost equal numbers. Yet 80 per cent of the people executed since 1977 were convicted of murders involving white victims.”
-“Federal death row inmate Louis Jones became the 183rd African American to be executed in the USA since 1977 for the murder of a white person (22 per cent of all executions). In the same period, 12 whites were put to death for the murder of blacks (1.4 per cent of executions).”
-“At least one in five of the African Americans executed since 1977 had been convicted by all-white juries”
–And, “In 1997, David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth examined the death penalty rates among all death eligible defendants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of 1983 and 1993. The results of their study proved that the odds of receiving the death penalty in Philadelphia increased by 38% when the accused was black.”
-“University of Iowa law professor David Baldus found that during the 1980s prosecutors in Georgia sought the death penalty for 70 % of black defendants with white victims, but for only 15% of white defendants with black victims.”
-“Notably among the 38 states that allow the death penalty, approximately 98% of the prosecutors are white.”
-“In the fall of 2000, The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released the results of an initial survey of federal death penalty prosecutions. The report shows that the federal death penalty, like its application in the states, is used disproportionately against people of color. Of the 18 prisoners currently on federal death row, 16 are either African-American, Hispanic or Asian. From 1995-2000, 80% of all the federal capital cases recommended by U.S. Attorneys to the Attorney General seeking the death penalty involved people of color. Even after review by the Attorney General, 72% of the cases approved for death penalty prosecution involved minority defendants.”
If you want to help out, consider donating to the Equal Justice Initiative.