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A Times EditorialChaos for the defense
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 5, 1999
The three offices established in 1997 to represent death row inmates are in crisis due to the lack of funding. The office serving the Tampa Bay area is rife with allegations of incompetence, inexperience and mismanagement, slowing the pace of executions to a crawl. The logjam proves once again, no matter how hard they try, legislators can't buy prisoners a ticket to the electric chair for less than full fare. Problems with the quality of death row representation are most severe at the middle regional office of Capital Collateral Representative headed by former prosecutor John Moser. An investigation by St. Petersburg Times staff writer Sydney Freedberg documents the questionable competence of some of the lawyers in the office, including reports of attorneys writing incomplete court briefs, failing to keep their clients abreast of developments, violating client confidentiality, failing to meet the American Bar Association standards for post-conviction work and even possibly practicing law without a license. Incompetence has already earned the office a reprimand by one judge. Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Crockett Farnell took the office to task for a laundry list of attorney-client duty violations in its representation of convicted murderer Jeffry Muehleman. Moser's office was found to be so inept, Farnell threw it off the case. But rather than take responsibility for his office's failings, Moser's response has been to blame the client and anti-death penalty interests. His paranoid view of things was summed up by Judge Farnell who told the Times, "Me think he doth protest too much." Before Moser took the top post at CCR-Middle, he had no experience defending death row inmates. He says he took the job because he saw it as a "challenge." In fairness, all the blame for the mess with death row defense shouldn't be laid at Moser's feet. The Legislature designed the system for failure. Tired of CCR winning cases, it purposely underfunded the three regional CCR offices. The result has been chaos, with too few attorneys and investigators handling too many cases. Stephen Hanlon, whose law firm Holland & Knight has sued the state over the current system of death row representation, says the state is providing prisoners with "the illusion of a lawyer." Moser's counterparts in the northern and southern regional CCR offices have joined the suit, saying they haven't been given the funding necessary to provide their clients an adequate defense. Yet Moser stubbornly refuses to join, despite his office's clear inability to handle its current caseload. Experts say that it would take an annual appropriation of $25-million to address the backlog of capital punishment cases, yet the Legislature appropriated CCR offices a total of just $6-million. It should be no surprise that cases are nearly gridlocked. Responsible judges are not going to allow executions to move forward when defense lawyers appear unprepared or too inexperienced to provide effective assistance. The Legislature has two reasonable choices: Either it can get rid of
the death penalty, or it can fund a system that provides competent
representation to those facing the electric chair. But the CCR system it
created, where former prosecutors, as opposed to experienced defense
attorneys, are chosen to defend death row prisoners and then denied the
resources to do the job, has come tumbling down.
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he house of
cards the Legislature built to speed along executions is falling down.
