Death Row Is Not A Perfect World
EVERY criminal, especially one on death row, is entitled to a lawyer, right? Wrong, if you are unfortunate enough to be awaiting execution in Alabama.
“Perhaps, in a perfect world, every inmate would have a lawyer at the ready at all times,” Alabama’s attorney general was quoted in the New York Times. “But we live in the real world.”
In Alabama’s real world if you on death row you are more than likely to be poor. And if you are poor there’s no way in hell that the good ‘ole boys will waste state funds defending your sorry ass.
Instead, inmates are forced to defend themselves. They are given access to a prison law library and expected to file petitions themselves. Not surprisingly, many petitions are thrown out because of procedural errors.
If the initial petition isn’t thrown out, inmates are eligible for a state-funded lawyer. But since the state doesn’t want to make the process too easy, they have capped the lawyer’s compensation at a total $1,000 (or about £550) for hundreds of hours of work.
The story made the New York Times today because Alabama’s inmates are bringing a class action suit against the state requesting the right to a lawyer.
Posted: 26th, March 2007 | In: Anorak In New York Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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March 27th, 2007 at 7:51 am
This is an absolute disgrace, people in the UK take note that it happened first here… right to trial by jury taken away etc.
This is an abomination of justice from the ‘land of the free’, where it would appear that you can be free, if you have enough money, but if you are poor and found guilty of a capital offence are only entitled to be executed (not necessarily actually guilty, just found guilty by a system clearly intended to favour the wealthy). The attitude seems to be that if you are poor you are not worth saving anyway, so why waste money? So what if you are not guilty.
And this comes from a country where they claim to be a God fearing society.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:10 am
And this happens in America - of all places!
March 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
that is really unjust - surely there are human rights conventions for this kind of thing. I wonder how many of these inmates are either innocent is simply mentally in an unfit state to be executed.