Category Archives: georgia

CT Supreme Court: To be a law firm you’d have to be a real lawyer

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If you’ve ever had to respond to an opposing party’s filing in Court, you know that some are very good and make your job challenging. And you know that some are so bad that you don’t know where to start. You sit and stare at the pleading or brief or whatever it may be and you stare at a blank computer screen because the depths and lengths of the sheer absurdity of the filing that you are tasked with criticizing and rebutting is unimaginable and it is swallowing your brain whole because there is no possible way any human being can even begin to deconstruct the stupendously mindboggling arguments that have been made. And you stare and stare in the hopes that someone will rescue you by showing up in your office and saying “April Fool’s! That’s not the real thing” or “hey, never mind about that reply because they withdrew their filing out of sheer embarrassment when they realized how it’s not even wrong” and then you resign yourself to the fact that you can’t actually submit a response that consists entirely of the Picard facepalm, because, while funny, it’s not very professional and so you write several different opening sentences only to delete them all and try again while swimming in the despair and futility of it all.

This is how I feel right now – and have felt since 11:30am yesterday morning, when the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its opinion in Anderson v. Commissioner [PDF].

Anderson is an appeal of an Appellate Court decision that I wrote about in October 2011. It was a post-conviction appeal in which Mr. Anderson argued that his conviction was illegal because his lawyer represented him in a way that violated the Sixth Amendment because the lawyer was operating under a conflict of interest.

This is a big deal, because everyone has the Constitutional right to have a lawyer whose only interest is the interest of that client and no one else. See Cuyler v. Sullivan. You can easily imagine why this is paramount. The client hires the attorney with the intention that the attorney will represent the client and only the client in his case and that the attorney is working for the client and what the client wants and thus the attorney’s loyalties cannot be divided.

There are very strict Rules of Professional Conduct that govern this matter and whether lawyers in the same law firm can represent two parties whose interests are at odds with one another. The rules are pretty clear, stating that you cannot do that, unless you get waivers from both clients. Unless, of course, you’re not a “real lawyer”. By which I mean you’re a public defender. Continue reading →

In Georgia, public means private

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Georgia: the land of misfit idiots and backward logic and a seemingly endless stream of opposite days. Georgia: a State whose official fruit is sweet to the taste but rotten to the core. Georgia: the only State to get its own category on this blog. Georgia: the State where public courtrooms apparently mean private courtrooms. At least in Massachusetts they don’t intentionally close courtrooms to the public.

Ben Hill and Crisp County operate Law Enforcement Centers [hereinafter “LECs”]. LECs contain each county’s jail and a courtroom to hold Superior Court criminal and juvenile delinquency proceedings. Pretrial detainees in the LEC jails appear in the LEC courtrooms for pretrial hearings, which include bond hearings, arraignments, calendar calls, and other criminal matters. Because many of the LEC pretrial detainees plead guilty and are sentenced at the LECs, the LEC courtrooms are often the only courtrooms they see.

Relatively speaking, the LEC courtrooms are not large. The Ben Hill County LEC courtroom has about thirty seats. The court reserves four to six seats for criminal defendants who appear before the court. A partition separates those seats from the remaining twenty-four seats. The Crisp County LEC courtroom has about twenty-five seats. Sheriff deputies place pretrial detainees in two rows of those seats, which apparently leaves about five seats available to the public.

Putting aside the problem I have with having defendants plead guilty on their dates of arraignment for a moment, this isn’t an issue of space. And even if it were, so what?

Family members and regular members of the public were apparently routinely denied access to the courtroom, despite a similar 2003 lawsuit that was dismissed because these very counties promised not to obstruct public access. And this is why consent decrees are useless.

When she arrived, a sheriff’s deputy told her she could not enter the courtroom until the judge called her grandson’s case. Ultimately, the deputy never allowed Hall to enter any of her grandson’s hearings, despite available seating.

Likewise, Plaintiff Beverly Fuqua tried, on three occasions in early 2012, to attend her son’s court appearances at the Ben Hill County LEC. Each time, the bailiff prevented her entry because her son did not plead guilty. She was not allowed to see any hearings.

On March 15, 2011, Plaintiff Joy Scales and her sister drove two and a half hours to see her nephew’s arraignment at the Crisp County LEC. After waiting in the lobby for several hours, she was prevented from watching her nephew’s hearing because he did not enter a guilty plea.

And on and on. The Counties argued that there was no formal “closure” of the courtroom and so the First Amendment was not implicated. In other words, that a court has to order the courtroom closed in order to trigger Constitutional protections. As we know from the discussion of the relevant caselaw in the Mass. post above, that’s not true. In dispensing with the Counties’ motion to dismiss, Judge Sands of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia made it clear [PDF]:

It is no answer to say that there were space limitations and Defendants could not accommodate everyone. This is a motion to dismiss, so the Court takes Plaintiffs allegations as true. The complaint shows that the court and bailiffs required every member of the public to identify himself or herself and only family members were allowed in, for sole purpose of briefly watching their relatives’ guilty pleas, regardless if more seats were available. Defendants make no attempt to refute Plaintiffs’ basic allegations that no one is free to enter the LEC courtrooms without permission and that many people never successfully gain entrance.

Defendant-Judges’ argument that the First Amendment right of access requires a “court order” (Doc. 9-1 at 9) is also unpersuasive. The allegations state that the judges ordered the bailiffs to close all hearings to the public, except in limited circumstances. Superior Court officers, for example, prevented Carl Ringgold from entering the proceedings without approval from the presiding Superior Court judge. (Doc. 1 ¶ 27(f).) The fact that the judges did not explicitly put the order on the record does not absolve the alleged conduct of a First Amendment violation. Such a requirement would render the First Amendment’s right of access a mere formality.

You can get access to other documents from the Southern Center for Human Rights’ press release.

Listen, Georgia, you don’t mind if we take a look, right? I mean, after all, why would you care about open access if you had nothing to hide?

Free-ish

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Sometimes I think that if it weren’t for Georgia and Justice Thomas, I wouldn’t have much to blog about. Having fulfilled the Thomas quota for the night, I now move on to that rotten peach of a state, which seems to be continually perplexed at the existence of the thing called “the indigent defendant” and completely at a loss to deal with them and their pesky “constitutional” rights.

Why just yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court heard oral argument in a case where the issue, as framed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was:

whether the state’s public defender system can ethically provide and — and also afford — conflict-free representation for thousands of indigent clients.

Go ahead, shed that tear. More, from the concisely named GeorgiaCriminalAppellateLawBlog (a LexBlog production, natch):

So, it came to pass that Michael Edwards, the leader of a circuit public defender’s office in South Georgia came to oral argument at the Supreme Court yesterday where he sat at the same table with an Assistant Attorney General, a prosecutor. Both the prosecutor and the the “public defender” appeared as co-counsel to argue against a bar rule regarding imputed conflicts in the representation of the poor.

What is this cataclysmic event that brought the two sides together? An ethics opinion [PDF], opining rather uncontroversially that:

Lawyers employed in the circuit public defender office in the same judicial circuit may not represent co-defendants when a single lawyer would have an impermissible conflict of interest in doing so.

In plain-speak-ese, if you – an individual lawyer – can’t represent co-defendants at the same time due to a conflict of interest, then neither can anyone else from your office. Not groundbreaking, not so far beyond the pale that it required the unholy union of a public defender and an attorney general.

The United States Supreme Court has long maintained that “a criminal defendant is entitled to be represented by an attorney free from conflicts of interest”. Wood v. Georgia, Strickland v. Washington, Cuyler v. Sullivan…I could go on and on. In fact, I can’t think of an ethical duty that is more important for the criminal defense attorney than this one to provide conflict-free representation. Just as the prosecutor’s duty is to seek justice (go ahead, chortle), ours is to our client and only to our client.

Yet it is this very duty that seems to give defense attorneys the most trouble. It is this unambiguous, bright line, don’t-touch-with-someone-else’s-10-foot-pole duty that somehow turns into a jumbled, confusing incomprehensible mess when it works its way through the neurons of public defender officials. It was this precise issue that the Connecticut Appellate Court considered last October (albeit erroneously concluding there wasn’t a conflict).

How then, given the Constitutional right and the ethical obligation, could the public defender’s office argue that it shouldn’t be required to provide this conflict-free resolution? The answer, as always, is money.

Stunningly, the explanation from the Georgia public defender isn’t that the right doesn’t exist, but that he can’t afford to provide it:

Mr. Edwards pointed out that he can’t afford to engage in egg-headed “philosophical” or “academic” discussions as a GPDSC bureaucrat. He has to be pragmatic about all this. We can’t afford to get off on this business about right and wrong. If you want conflict-free representation, then either stop getting accused of crime or stop being poor.

He didn’t say that last bit, but he might as well have. Public defenders have enough of a PR problem as it is. Siding with the state on whether to provide our clients conflict-free representation isn’t really helping our cause.

Look, I get it. There is only so much money and there are only so many resources. The answer, however, isn’t to capitulate and argue that our clients should be entitled to conflict-free-ish representation, but instead to do what we’re supposed to: stand up for our clients and demand the State to adequately fund the prosecutions they seem so happy to initiate. If, in this no-brainer of a situation, we public defenders take positions that are clearly contrary to our clients’ interests, then is it any wonder that they refuse to trust us and call us pawns of the prosecution?

The duty isn’t ambiguous or predicated on the availability of funds. Free isn’t free-ish.

Georgia’s retarded

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In 2002, in the landmark decision Atkins v. Virginia, SCOTUS held that it was a violation of the 8th Amendment to execute a mentally retarded individual. In a beautifully succinct opinion, Justice Stevens (Kagan? Kagan who?) wrote for a 6-3 majority that the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments prohibited the execution of the mentally retarded. In that opinion, he noted a movement in state legislatures toward banning the execution of those who are mentally retarded:

The parties have not called our attention to any state legislative consideration of the suitability of imposing the death penalty on mentally retarded offenders prior to 1986. In that year, the public reaction to the execution of a mentally retarded murderer in Georgia apparently led to the enactment of the first state statute prohibiting such executions…

Georgia, once at the forefront of radical movements in the criminal justice system, is now floundering at the bottom. Yesterday, the GA Supreme Court upheld [pdf] the constitutionality of a statute that requires defendants to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are, in fact, mentally retarded. In a decision that is short on logic or reasoning and long on law-and-order-fed-vengeance, a 6-1 majority relied – I kid you not – on the fact that SCOTUS, in Atkins said nothing negative about GA’s burden of proof. Don’t believe me? Here:

In Atkins, the Supreme Court praised Georgia as being the first state in the nation to have banned the execution of mentally retarded persons, and the Supreme Court made no negative comment about Georgia’s heightened burden of proof, but instead counted Georgia among the states forming the national consensus about the treatment of mentally retarded defendants.

…

Georgia, among other states with heightened standards for defining and proving mental retardation, was counted by the Supreme Court as being part of the national consensus regarding the treatment of mentally retarded defendants, and it seems to us entirely illogical that Georgia could have been a part of the consensus dictating a categorical rule and yet somehow simultaneously in violation of that rule.

(Emphasis in original.) Justice Melton, who authored the 6-1 GA decision, seems to have a massive reading comprehension problem. Atkins was a decision about whether the practice of executing mentally retarded people violated the Constitution, and to that extent the Court’s praise (such as it was) of the Georgia statute was warranted. What the court in Atkins was not deciding was the burden of proof required to find that a defendant is mentally retarded. But it gets worse. Here’s what Justice Stevens wrote:

To the extent there is serious disagreement about the execution of mentally retarded offenders, it is in determining which offenders are in fact retarded. In this case, for instance, the Commonwealth of Virginia disputes that Atkins suffers from mental retardation. Not all people who claim to be mentally retarded will be so impaired as to fall within the range of mentally retarded offenders about whom there is a national consensus. As was our approach in Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U. S. 399 (1986), with regard to insanity, “we leave to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences.” Id., at 405, 416-417.

Nowhere in Atkins does the Court say that a defendant must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is mentally retarded in order to save execution. The paragraph above and its mention of the definition of mental retardation stems from the large number of briefs submitted to the court by psychiatric organizations highlighting that mental retardation isn’t a definite concept that can be given a fixed number. While we may now generally use an IQ range of 70-75 to separate those who are “retarded” from those who aren’t, any reasonably-versed practitioner will tell you that that is not something that can be set in stone. Individuals with an IQ of 80 may well be mentally retarded. In that vein, make sure you read this terrific law review article on the challenges of implementing Atkins. Here’s an excerpt, which highlights the problem:

What is so striking about Atkins is that the Court was persuaded to adopt a per se rule exempting all persons with mental retardation from the death penalty based on diagnosis alone. This is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the line between being mentally retarded and being of borderline intelligence is operationalized statistically by an admittedly arbitrary line on a bell curve representing performance on an IQ test two standard deviations below the mean. In short, the diagnosis of mental retardation is in large part a statistical construct.

As for Melton’s claim that since they were praised for being on the forefront of this change, they should be allowed to rest on their laurels? The dissent rips it to shreds.

It seems that Georgia is now the only state in the country that requires such an impossible burden. Of the 35 states that impose the death penalty (and thus prohibit the execution of the mentally retarded), 22 require proof by a preponderance of the evidence – a much, much lower standard. Four states require proof by clear and convincing evidence and the three States (*cough*Connecticut*cough*) have not yet articulated the standard, though I would be surprised if it were anything but preponderance here.

The dissent also rightly points out the import of the language in Atkins, that the highest burden of proof needs to be reserved for the determination of factual allegations and scientific diagnoses are by nature more fuzzy. To subject the interpretation of test scores, manifested symptoms and perceived cognitive difficulties to that high standard would only serve to ensure that a mentally retarded individual will be executed, thus clearly violating the Constitution.

Even more puzzling, to me, is the fact that it seems that Georgia has no standard for proving mitigation in capital cases. It seems that juries can decide to recommend a sentence of life for any reason whatsoever. In fact, one of the complaints [pdf] about Georgia’s capital system is that its jury instructions are so poorly crafted that juries are regularly misled: a full 62.2% of jurors surveyed in this study believed that the defense had to prove mitigating factors beyond a reasonable doubt, which is incorrect.

Think about that. Georgia defendants aren’t even required to prove ordinary mitigation factors. A defendant may get up and say “spare me, I’m left handed” and the jury can say “but we saw you writing with your right hand” and still decide, that because he’s left handed, they’ll spare his life. A defendant can claim to be the love child of Amelia Earhart and Britney Spears, and based on that that jury can spare his life. But if the defendant is mentally retarded and thus protected by the Constitution, he must prove it beyond a reasonable doubt?

That’s not only troubling, it is what I call retarded. I think it’s about time Georgia got its own category on this blog.