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Death Row Lawyers Get Paid While Messing Up

By standdown

That's the title of a report by Lise Olsen in today's Houston Chronicle.  LINKTexas lawyers have repeatedly missed deadlines for appeals on behalf of more than a dozen death row inmates in the last two years ? yet judges continue to assign life-or-death capital cases and pay hundreds of thousands in fees to those attorneys, a Chronicle records review shows. Missing deadlines means their clients can be automatically denied constitutionally mandated reviews before their execution. Houston lawyer Jerome Godinich missed three recent federal deadlines, the Chronicle reported in March. One client was executed in February after the federal appeal was filed too late. In March, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals chastened Godinich for using the same excuse ? a malfunctioning after-hours filing machine ? for missing another deadline for a man still on death row...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 20, 2009 (boomark / email).