Public Defense

The rotten peach? It?s in Washington now

By Gideon

Maybe there’s nothing more than coincidence at work here and maybe I have my understanding of the philosophies of Supreme Court justices all wrong, but I find it noteworthy that on the first day in 35 (!!!) years that SCOTUS opened a term without a justice named Stevens sitting in one of the 9 chairs, and on the eve of the release of the biography of Justice Brennan, they also denied cert to Jamie Ryan Weis, that most unfortunate of Georgia defendants. Weis, of course, is the poster boy for the failed public defender system in Georgia, which was once heralded, but then crippled by, among other things, the unsuccessful capital prosecution of Brian Nichols.

Georgia’s Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, did not find any problem with Georgia’s public defender system or the lack of funding or the fact that his lawyers withdrew and a new set of lawyers asked not to be appointed or….sigh.

And now a system that provides little to no adequate representation to those charged with and convicted of the most serious crimes with the most serious attendant penalty receives no Federal review. SCOTUS just denied cert. No explanation, no dissents, nothing.The stench has spread to Washington.

For a while now I’ve argued that these individual claims in State courts in individual cases will do little to bring the issue of systemic failure into the spotlight. That the only way to adequately challenge the failure to provide counsel is through lawsuits against the State (and maybe this latest legislation will help do just that). With this latest rejection by SCOTUS, it seems that Jamie Weis (and others) may have run out of all other options.

We haven’t yet seen what Justice Kagan will do for the everyman and I’ve been told by many, including His Presidency that she’ll be just fine. Maybe. But maybe, just maybe, if Justice Stevens were still on the bench, we’d have had someone take an honest and critical view of the mess that is Georgia:

The U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has taken a close look at Georgia’s capital punishment procedures. Now-retired Justice John Paul Stevens in 2008 slammed the state’s high court for an “utterly perfunctory” review of a death penalty case.

But we’ll never know. Sorry, Jamie Weis. It seems that when it comes to capital murder, close enough for government work is better than you deserve.

Full post as published by A Public Defender on October 04, 2010 (boomark / email).