Center reports that legal representation for the poor in criminal cases in Georgia is often deficientPoor people accused of crimes in Georgia often do not receive competent legal representation from court-appointed lawyers, according to a report released by the Southern Center for Human Rights on November 9, 2000. The Center is conducting a study of the representation provided the poor in Georgia. This study is a preliminary summary of what the Center has found. The Center found that some people charged with crimes receive no representation at all and are forced to fend for themselves in court without a lawyer, even in serious cases where they may be sent to prison for years. Others receive only perfunctory representation in a process that resembles an assembly line more that a court of justice. "Representation" may amount to nothing more than a hurried, whispered conversation with court-appointed lawyer outside the courtroom or even in court before the accused enters a guilty plea or goes to trial. Others may languish in jail for days, weeks or months before seeing a lawyer. Among other things, the Center found:
The report also describes the consequences of such representation for the poor people who receive it. For example, a contract lawyer assigned to represent a client who was charged with murder of her baby met with the client only a few times for only a few minutes, including appearances in court. The lawyer never sought to have his client, who was mentally retarded, examined by an expert, and apparently never looked at the autopsy report which listed the cause of death as "undetermined." He counseled his client to plead guilty to manslaughter. She accepted his advice, entered the plea, and she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The first two people executed in George after the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of capital punishment were executed because their lawyers failed to object to legal violations in their cases. Their co-defendants, who were also sentenced to death, were lucky enough to be assigned well-informed lawyers who raise the legal issues in the two cases. They receive life sentences. If the lawyers had been switched when the appointments were made, the results would have been exactly opposite Two major reasons for the problems are the fragmentation of responsibility for providing lawyers to the poor to each of Georgia s 159 counties and insufficient funding. Despite the lack of funding, 23 of Georgia s counties do not even apply for state-allocated funds for court-appointed lawyers. For many counties the most important objective is minimizing cost, not providing the poor with the zealous and effective representation to which they are entitled. A third reason for the poor representation, the Center reported, is the lack of independence of the lawyers appointed. In most counties, lawyers are appointed by the presiding judge. Lawyers may be hesitant to competently represent their clients for fear of alienating the judge. "Judges, journalists, attorneys and others have long been aware of serious deficiencies in indigent defense in Georgia," said Stephen Bright, director of the Center. "This report demonstrates these problems are not limited to the few cases that have received press attention, but rather that Georgia is not living up to its constitutional responsibility to provide fair and just treatment to everyone who comes before the courts," Bright continued. The purpose of the Center s study is to bring to public attention the serious deficiencies in legal representation for the poor, to demonstrate the urgency of the need to correct those deficiencies, and to provide a basis for further study and for proposals to bring about the fair and equal treatment for all people who come before the courts. Click here for the entire report, Promises to Keep: Achieving Fairness and Equal Justice for the Poor in Criminal Cases. |