{"id":1331,"date":"2011-10-05T09:58:35","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T07:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1331"},"modified":"2011-11-02T22:19:32","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T20:19:32","slug":"how-bad-do-your-lawyers-have-to-be-for-you-to-get-a-new-trial-in-a-death-penalty-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1331","title":{"rendered":"How bad do your lawyers have to be for you to get a new trial… in a death penalty case?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The New York Times<\/a> reports a ridiculous case<\/a> that was heard by the Supreme Court<\/a>, which seems to come right out of the movie Brazil<\/a>, in which a combination of events leads to a defendant in a capital murder case losing his rights to appeal in the state of Alabama.\u00a0 According to the article, a court had sent its ruling to two associates at a firm in New York who had work on behalf of defendant Cory Maples.\u00a0 The problems started when the associates left.\u00a0 The firm then returned the judgment to the court marked “returned to sender”.\u00a0 The court clerk received the envelope and did nothing.\u00a0 The local counsel of record also failed to follow up with the appeal.\u00a0 Eventually, the window that defendants have to file appeals elapsed, at which point the prosecutor seemingly gloated directly to Mr. Maples.<\/p>\n

The only good news in this case is that the Supreme Court is now hearing it, and at least in oral arguments they seem to have been as incensed at the callous treatment of a defendant as one would hope they should be.<\/p>\n

So now my questions, and I have many:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Why is it that this case had to get to the Supreme Court in the first place?\u00a0 Is administrative incompetence grounds for rushing to kill someone?<\/li>\n
  2. Does the current state of law and societal view towards prosecutorial discretion need correction?\u00a0 Here, in a case where the prosecutor clearly could have weighed in to prevent a travesty, he instead seemingly chose to gloat.\u00a0 Doesn’t that argue for stronger judicial oversight?<\/li>\n
  3. Should there be sanctions against the local lawyer who failed to at all follow up in a death penalty case?<\/li>\n
  4. In this case, how broadly should the Court rule?\u00a0 They could simply state that the confluence of events led to a perverse situation that requires redress, and narrowly rule, or they could require that states shoulder at least some burden to see that defendants are receiving fair treatment.\u00a0 What would that look like?<\/li>\n
  5. If this is what happens in death penalty cases, what sort of miscarriages of justice are taking place in other cases, and how do we know?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    What do you think?<\/p>\n

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

    The New York Times reports a ridiculous case that was heard by the Supreme Court, which seems to come right out of the movie Brazil, in which a combination of events leads to a defendant in a capital murder case losing his rights to appeal in the state of Alabama.\u00a0 According to the article, a … Continue reading “How bad do your lawyers have to be for you to get a new trial… in a death penalty case?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,4],"tags":[418,419,22],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity","category-politics","tag-death-penalty","tag-deffective-counsel","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}