Political Quotes

“Sixty-three years ago, in Powell versus Alabama, the case involving the Scottsboro boys, the Supreme Court established as a constitutional principle that indigent defendants would not be sentenced to death unless they were represented by competent counsel. That promise remains unfulfilled to this day and it is one of the most glaring omissions in the McCollum bill. Having competent counsel is so important because failure at the front end, that is, the trial stage, leads to the delays and multiple petitions at the back end that resulted in retrials being ordered in 40 percent of all habeas petitions filed since 1976. Without competent counsel at trials any reform is meaningless. Leaving it to the States to appoint counsel is no solution because the current system is a disaster: in Kentucky, attorneys who represented a quarter of the State's 26 death row inmates have since been suspended, disbarred, or convicted of crimes. In Mississippi and Arkansas, compensation for death row attorneys was limited by statute to $1,000, though hundreds of hours of work are involved. In one judicial district in Georgia, capital cases were awarded to the lowest bidder. South Carolina pays $10 per hour for out-of-court work and $15 for in-court work. That is the system the McCollum bill would seek to preserve: uncompensated, ill-prepared and inexpert counsel for those whose lives are hanging in the balance. Surely, we can do better.…”