{"id":3600,"date":"2022-11-10T16:48:43","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T16:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/aer\/?p=3600"},"modified":"2022-10-03T16:56:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T16:56:47","slug":"lessons-from-an-old-capital-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/aer\/2022\/11\/10\/lessons-from-an-old-capital-case\/","title":{"rendered":"LESSONS FROM AN OLD CAPITAL CASE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Capital cases \u2013 those where the death penalty was sought and then imposed \u2013 can last for decades.\u00a0 There are at least two reasons for this \u2013 they deserve the greatest attention and review because life is at stake; and the poor lawyering that led to so many capital convictions warrants that review and takes time to get corrected.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That phenomenon \u2013 poor lawyering \u2013 came to the fore in a recent challenge to a death sentence imposed over a quarter century ago.\u00a0 The context was a claim that there was a complete system failure \u2013 the quality of court-appointed counsel\u2019s lawyering so poor that who was counsel was a determining factor in whether a death sentence was returned.<\/p>\n

Plenty of data support that conclusion, but an added part of the review looked at this one case to see whether the system failure played out on the individual level, i.e.<\/em>, whether this one court-appointed counsel lived up [or down, as the case might be] to the general finding of deficiency for that collective group of lawyers and thus confirmed the statistical analysis.\u00a0 The result of that review \u2013 just reading the penalty trial transcript \u2013 found a shocking number of errors, each glaring in their own right.\u00a0 They were found by this author after being asked to offer expert testimony regarding capital case representation and the court-appointed-counsel system from the time the case was tried.<\/p>\n

Death penalty practice and law have been described as the \u2018brain surgery of criminal law.\u00a0 Here, most of the errors were more fundamental, ones no lawyer with even rudimentary grasp of capital case law should have missed.\u00a0 Restating them has its worth \u2013 as an historic record of system failure and, perhaps, as a reminder of principles of law sometimes still ignored or flouted.<\/p>\n

Where did things begin to go wrong?\u00a0 At the guilt-determining trial, the prosecutor was explicit in telling the jury that this defendant was not the shooter but an accomplice.\u00a0 In her penalty trial closing, counsel ignored what should have been deemed a binding admission and told the jury that she understood how some of them might believe he was the actual killer.<\/p>\n

Having ignored what was arguably a binding \u2018judicial admission\u2019 of fact, counsel then sat by as the prosecutor made repeated errors in the penalty trial closing.\u00a0 The prosecutor misstated the balancing test the jury must apply when weighing aggravating and mitigating factors; told the jury that the defense evidence of mitigation deserved no weight as it did not \u201cexcuse\u201d the murder, when mitigation proof has no such requirement, a point established by the United States Supreme Court years before trial; argued that the defendant deserved death for a murder not charged in this case; and then put the jurors in the seat of the person riding next to one of the murder victims, an impermissible \u2018golden rule\u2019 argument.<\/p>\n

Counsel\u2019s own closing did her client no good.\u00a0 Beyond letting jurors think her client might have been the principal actor, she failed to mention the mitigation proof she had offered of positive prison adjustment, giving jurors no idea as to why and how this could justify a sentence less than death.\u00a0 All this in a case where the entire presentation to save a man\u2019s life ran for fewer than a dozen pages of text.<\/p>\n

So \u2013 why tell this story now?\u00a0 Because in the years of appeals no court has addressed any of the errors listed here, itself a systems error; because we still have no process that ensures lawyers know enough that glaring errors like this can\u2019t recur; and to bear witness that we have on Pennsylvania\u2019s death row an individual whose sentence came from an error-ridden proceeding.<\/p>\n

The Judge will have to decide the legal questions of whether the statistical proof of court-appointed counsels\u2019 failure rate is \u2018new\u2019 evidence and, if new, suffices to overturn this death sentence.\u00a0 But what the case review has already determined can\u2019t be denied \u2013 this defendant never got what the Sixth Amendment and justice require, a lawyer who could ensure the law was followed and did not herself violate that canon found in medicine of \u2018first, do no harm.\u2019<\/p>\n

A version of this article was first printed in THE LEGAL INTELLIGENCER of September 30, 2022.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Capital cases \u2013 those where the death penalty was sought and then imposed \u2013 can last for decades.\u00a0 There are at least two reasons for this \u2013 they deserve the greatest attention and review because life is at stake; and the poor lawyering that led to so many capital convictions warrants that review and takes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,11],"tags":[],"coauthors":[330],"class_list":["post-3600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocacy-and-evidence-blog","category-criminal-law","category-trial-advocacy"],"yoast_head":"\nLESSONS FROM AN OLD CAPITAL CASE - Advocacy and Evidence Resources<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/aer\/2022\/11\/10\/lessons-from-an-old-capital-case\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LESSONS FROM AN OLD CAPITAL CASE - 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