OT
An accumulation of this kind of news is how I became such a rabid anti-Republican. I am not surprised that Republican appointees and one reputedly slated to be W's next Supreme Court nominee would decide that a sleeping defense lawyer is no grounds for a retrial in a capital offense case.
Published Saturday, October 28, 2000, in the San
Jose Mercury News
No new trial in
`sleeping lawyer' case
DEATH ROW DEFENSE
ADEQUATE, COURT SAYS
BY HENRY WEINSTEIN
Los Angeles Times
A defendant in a capital-murder trial does not
have an absolute constitutional right to have an attorney who stays
awake for the entire trial, a sharply divided federal appeals court in
New Orleans ruled Friday.
The ruling came in the case of Calvin J. Burdine, whose death sentence
for a 1983 murder in Texas drew considerable -- and unfavorable --
attention to that state's death-penalty system.
During Burdine's trial, his court-appointed lawyer, Joe Frank Cannon,
frequently fell asleep, according to jurors and the court clerk. Last year,
a federal district judge in Houston had ordered a new trial for Burdine,
saying that ``a sleeping counsel is equivalent to no counsel at all.''
But by a 2-1 majority, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
disagreed. The judges were not ``condoning sleeping by defense
counsel during a capital murder trial,'' Judges Rhesa H. Barksdale and
Edith H. Jones wrote in their ruling. But from the trial record, ``it is
impossible to determine -- instead, only to speculate -- that counsel's
sleeping'' actually hurt Burdine's case, the majority said.
Jones, who was appointed to the appeals court by President Reagan,
has been widely touted as a possible Supreme Court pick if Texas Gov.
George W. Bush wins the presidential election. Barksdale was
appointed by Bush's father when he was president.
But in a stinging dissent, appellate judge Fortunato P. Benavides, an
appointee of President Clinton, said ``it shocks the conscience that a
defendant could be sentenced to death under the circumstances
surrounding counsel's representation of Burdine.''
Even if Friday's ruling stands, Burdine, who already has had four stays
of execution, will not immediately be put to death. His lawyers have
raised several other issues that await decisions.
The Burdine case came to national attention during the presidential
primaries this spring when Bush was asked about ``sleeping lawyers'' in
Texas death-penalty cases. Bush said the fact that Burdine's guilty
verdict and death sentence had been reversed showed that ``the system
worked.'' He did not mention that the state already had appealed that
reversal.
Cannon, who is now dead, also slept through the trial of another
defendant who already has been executed, according to appellate court
records. |
