New York Times Inmates on Alabama's Death Row Lack Lawyers By DAVID FIRESTONE Montgomery, ALA -- All but two states with the death penalty guarantee prisoners
a lawyer for the full range of appeals allowed by the legal system.
In Alabama and Georgia, however, there is no guarantee of a lawyer
after the direct appeal of a conviction, and prisoners have only
inconsistent access to a legal process that frequently overturns
death sentences. Thirty prisoners on Alabama's death row have no lawyers to pursue
appeals, by far the largest such group in any state. At a time when
some other states are considering suspending executions, debating
racial disparities in capital convictions or examining the wisdom of
executing mentally retarded prisoners, Alabama officials remain
firmly opposed to changes in the state's death penalty system. The lack of appeals lawyers in Alabama is one reason the state
has the fastest-growing death row in the country and the
second-largest number of condemned prisoners per capita, after
Nevada. With 188 people sentenced to die, Alabama has twice the
percentage of condemned inmates per capita as Texas. And in such a
system, inmates can come close to execution without exercising all
their legal options. Two of Alabama's 30 death row prisoners without lawyers recently
came within hours of execution because they missed deadlines for
appeals. They won postponements from federal judges, who ruled that
the risk of being wrongly executed without a proper hearing
outweighed such deadlines, particularly when the prisoners were
unaware of the deadlines and could not prepare their own appeals.
The prisoners won stays only after volunteer lawyers from out of
state filed emergency petitions on their behalf. With volunteers in short supply, opponents of the death penalty
argue that it is only a matter of time before Alabama executes
someone who never had access to the full protection of the legal
system. "We don't provide the resources to give people a full defense,"
said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice
Initiative of Alabama, a nonprofit group here that represents
prisoners. "The system puts prisoners in the position of
investigating new facts and presenting claims of legal error, which
is a little tough if you're on death row." Attorney General Bill Pryor of Alabama said he saw no need for
the state to pay for death penalty appeals beyond the first when
there is no right to them. Mr. Pryor said the state should increase
the money paid to trial lawyers for indigent defendants. If a
defendant gets a fair trial, he said, there should be no need for
several rounds of appeals. Since the Supreme Court's 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright,
every defendant has had the right to a lawyer for a trial and a
direct appeal, and Alabama pays for such lawyers for poor people, as
every other state does. Though they are not required to do so by the
United States Constitution, every state with the death penalty,
except Georgia and Alabama, guarantees legal representation to
condemned prisoners who lose their initial appeal. In these cases, lawyers for death row inmates can ask a state
court judge for a review or ask a federal judge to grant a writ of
habeas corpus, a legal judgment that a defendant is held in custody
in violation of the Constitution. Such an order typically directs
state officials to grant a new trial or sentence hearing. Strictly speaking, the habeas process is not an appeal, but
rather a new civil case brought by a prisoner to test the
constitutionality of a sentence. In these cases, prisoners can raise
issues like new DNA evidence, and alibi witnesses who were never
called. Prisoners were filing and winning so many such suits —
nearly 40 percent of the federal habeas cases overturned death
sentences — that Congress in 1996 restricted prisoners to one habeas
petition and limited the time in which to file them to one year
after conviction or the discovery of new evidence. Alabama limits such petitions filed in state court to two years.
Under these time limits, if prisoners cannot find a lawyer to file
these civil cases, their habeas rights will expire. Alabama will pay $1,000 a case for lawyers willing to work on
such appeals, but the amount does little to cover the cost of
mounting complex litigation. A bill to set up a state defender
office failed in the Legislature, and there is currently no
political support for changing the system. In Georgia, the Legislature appropriates about $700,000 a year
for a nonprofit center that employs six lawyers to prepare death
penalty appeals. In Alabama, Mr. Stevenson's center receives no
state money, relying on private donations. Speaking of death penalty case reviews beyond the first appeal,
Mr. Pryor, the Alabama attorney general, said: "These appeals are
crucial only for Monday-morning quarterbacks who try to second-guess
things and create issues that were probably not real in the first
place. It's an abuse of the habeas corpus process to retry the case
after it's already been tried and appealed." Gov. Donald Siegelman has also said that the appeals for death
row prisoners take far too long. One Alabama death row inmate on the verge of losing his rights to
having his case reviewed was Christopher Barbour, convicted in 1993
of stabbing to death a 40-year-old woman. Mr. Barbour, 31, confessed
to the crime but later said his confession was coerced. Three
lawyers began work on his appeals but dropped the case for various
reasons. The case was dormant for more than two years as the time
periods for appeals expired, and the state set an execution date of
May 25. On May 21, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in
New York filed a request for a stay of execution with the United
States District Court in Birmingham; less than 48 hours before Mr.
Barbour's scheduled electrocution, Judge Myron H. Thompson agreed to
the stay. The judge said that even though the deadlines had expired,
Mr. Barbour's new claims of innocence merited a hearing,
particularly relating to new DNA evidence. A similar stay was issued on April 25, when another federal judge
ruled that the courts should consider the claims of innocence of
Thomas D. Arthur, who was convicted in 1991 of shooting to death the
husband of his girlfriend. (At the time, Mr. Arthur was on
work-release from prison while serving a 1977 life sentence for
another murder.) That stay was granted two days before the scheduled
execution after a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society of New York
filed a late petition. Both condemned men will now get federal hearings. Mr. Pryor said that the stays proved that inmates had access to
counsel. "They can get some of the best lawyers in the country to
represent them," he said, "much better than the people of Alabama
could afford if we were paying for it." The Legal Aid Society has set up a project to recruit
out-of-state lawyers to represent Alabama prisoners, but legal
advocates say they never know from case to case whether a lawyer can
be found for a prisoner whose execution is near. Another reason for the size of Alabama's death row cited by many
lawyers here is the ability of state judges to impose death
sentences even after juries have recommended life in prison. Alabama
is the only state where judges routinely overturn such
recommendations, and nearly a quarter of the prisoners on death row
were sentenced to death by an elected judge after a jury voted for a
verdict of life. William Bowen Jr., the former presiding judge of the Alabama
Court of Criminal Appeals, said most judges would prefer not to have
this power, because it heightened the pressure to impose the death
penalty. "Judicial politics has gotten so dirty in this state that your
opponent in an election simply has to say that you're soft on crime
because you haven't imposed the death penalty enough," Mr. Bowen
said. "People run for re-election on that basis, because the popular
opinion in the state is, Let's hang 'em." Copyright © 2001. New York Times . All rights reserved. saved from url: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/16/national/16ALAB.html
June 16, 2001
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