Solutions Sought for Lack of Death Penalty Lawyers

As California’s shortage of death row lawyers worsens, Gov. Pete Wilson and lawmakers have been weighing remedies.

“We are looking into the whole issue,” said Sean Walsh, Wilson’s press secretary. “It’s a comprehensive look to see how to expedite putting someone to death who’s on death row.”

Meanwhile, two bills offering solutions have sprung from a series of legislative hearings on death row delays held in Sacramento in December.

Assemblyman Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) has sponsored AB 195, which would require the trial judge in a death row case to certify the trial record within 90 days or have his pay docked.

Others suggest following Florida’s example--hiring enough qualified attorneys for the California public defender’s office so they could work full time handling all death row appeals.

AB 2008 would force the state to hire enough attorneys to make the public defender’s office the primary appointee for death row cases. It is awaiting committee review.

“No matter how you come down on the death penalty, not having a lawyer for a death row inmate is a ludicrous reason to keep them sitting there,” said its author, Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles).

With state public defenders handling death cases, he said, “You’d get more effective representation because you’d have people who do this full time. And I think the attorneys would be more likely to pursue [cases] vigorously.”

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Kossoris says that if funding the public defender proves cheaper than spending $5 million a year to appoint private attorneys, the public defender’s annual budget should be linked directly to its caseload.

“Legislators and other people who are most for the death penalty have shot themselves in the foot in many instances,” said Kossoris, who won the death sentence against Gregory Scott Smith in the 1990 torture-murder of 8-year-old Paul Bailly. “As soon as we started having budget problems, they started cutting way back on the public defender’s budget.”

Palo Alto defense attorney John Schuck points out that some Californians believe that it’s worth killing a few innocent death row inmates just to speed up executions.

“The moral argument [by some] that the death penalty is just immoral, and other people saying it’s justified, an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth--that is a never-ending battle,” he said.

“I don’t think opponents of the death penalty will ever prevail on that because there’s just too many people who think it is a moral solution. If [the death penalty is] ever going to get banished in this state, it’s going to have to come down to money.”

George Kendall, staff attorney for the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, agreed.

“The problem is, there’s no political will to make it happen,” he said. “In most states, state legislators are willing to fund one side of the adversarial aisle--prosecutors. They’re not willing to set up a similar structure so there are adequate and competent defenders at every step of the process.”