Georgia Spotlight on Nation's Indigent Defense Systems

Jamie Weis, accused in 2006 of killing an elderly neighbor and now having been in the criminal justice system & county jail for four years, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to delve into what he claims is a breakdown of Georgia's public defender system.

Marcia Coyle's National Law Journal article this morning says, "Weis' petition for review comes at a time when an increasing number of legal challenges are being made to underfunded and overburdened state indigent defense systems. Several lawsuits are pending in Georgia, and courts in New York and Michigan recently have given the green light to class actions against those state systems for alleged failures to provide adequate legal representation."

Georgia's supreme court last March upheld Weis' conviction, ruling, 4-3, that delays were primarily attributable to Weis, not the state, and that Weis did not have a right to his choice of counsel and had refused to cooperate with his public defenders.

But Coyle's article's highlighting a variation of the indigent defense theme by pointing out that "in the U.S. Supreme Court, lead counsel Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, argues this is not a counsel-of-choice issue but an issue of continuity of counsel. Only Georgia, Louisiana and two federal circuits -- the 2nd and 6th -- refuse to recognize that, once the attorney-client bond of trust and confidence has been established, counsel cannot be removed absent some extreme circumstances. 'There's a whole string of [lower court] cases saying, unless the lawyer is just disabled or engages in contemptuous behavior, you can't sever the relationship,' Bright said. 'This wasn't about Weis' seeking preference of counsel but opposing counsel moving to remove counsel. I think the Court will be offended by that.'"

"Harder to convince the justices will be Bright's argument that there was a systemic breakdown of the state public defender system. In that analysis, the justices weigh a series of factors set out in their 1973 decision Barker v. Wingo. Just last term, in Vermont v. Brillon, they rejected the argument in a speedy-trial case where the defendant went through six lawyers, firing one and threatening to kill another."