On the same day Donald Gates was released from prison after DNA exonerated him (28 years too late), the Southern Center for Human Rights filed suit against the State for “its failure to provide counsel for nearly 200 convicted indigent defendants who do not have lawyers to represent them in their appeals.”
“The Constitution and state law require that indigent defendants in Georgia be provided with counsel at every critical stage of a criminal prosecution, including the motion for new trial and direct appeal. Appeals are a critical safeguard to ensure that convictions are constitutional and the right to counsel is no less important on appeal than it is at trial. It is inexcusable for some of our plaintiffs to have been incarcerated for years without counsel when the law could not be clearer,” said Lauren Sudeall Lucas, staff attorney at SCHR. “The Constitution has to be a line item in the State’s budget.”
For those who think post-conviction appeals aren’t important, tell that to Donald Gates.
One Response to Georgia fails to hear Gideon’s trumpet
Help Daniel
‘Cause I hate these ‘orphan’ posts, and it’s a universal problem. Some relevant discussion heard here earlier today on Valerie Jackson’s ‘Between the lines’ Program:
http://www.pba.org/programming/programs/btl/
December 18, 2009
Amy Bach, author of Ordinary Justice: How America Holds Court
Macmillan Books
“From an award-winning lawyer-reporter, a radically new explanation for America‚Äôs failing justice system. The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent. Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system. In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible-the first and necessary step to any reform. Amy Bach, a member of the New York bar, has written on law for The Nation, The American Lawyer, and New York magazine, among other publications”.
http://us.macmillan.com/ordinaryinjustice
JMP