No Conflict of Interest, Justices Rule on Lawyer in Capital Case

The Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday for Virginia to execute a murderer whose court-appointed lawyer represented the victim at the time he was slain.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said the rather bizarre conflict of interest did not require a new trial.

Justice Antonin Scalia set a high standard for defendants who claim their lawyers failed them because of a conflict of interest.

A defendant must show the conflict “adversely affected his counsel’s performance,” Scalia said. The court’s duty is “not to enforce the Canons of Legal Ethics,” but to reverse an “unreliable verdict.”

In this case, inmate Walter Mickens Jr. could not show that his lawyer had turned in a subpar performance during his trial nine years ago. He and his new appellate lawyers could only suggest that the trial counsel might have pursued other leads or made different arguments to spare Mickens.

The four dissenters said the trial obviously was flawed and should have been set aside. They expressed amazement that a Virginia judge assigned the same local lawyer to represent Mickens just weeks after assigning him to defend the victim, Timothy Hall of Newport News, who had been charged with an assault against his mother.

The lawyer, Bryan Saunders, met with Hall for less than 30 minutes to discuss the case. A few days later, Hall, 17, was found dead. He had been stabbed repeatedly and sodomized.

Mickens was charged with the crime. He had an extensive criminal record, including two convictions for sodomy. He also implicated himself in a conversation with a police officer.

“To foist a murder victim’s lawyer onto his accused is not only capricious. It poisons the integrity of our adversary system of justice,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in one of three dissenting opinions.

A local newspaper had reported that Hall’s body was found in an area frequented by homosexuals. A lawyer for Mickens might have focused on this point during the trial, possibly to suggest the meeting between Mickens and Hall was initially consensual, according to a brief filed by Mickens’ appellate lawyers.

But this might “cast Hall in a bad light,” something Saunders might have been reluctant to do, they said.

The case of Mickens vs. Virginia, 00-9285, drew as much attention from legal ethicists as from those who track the death penalty.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, several experts in legal ethics argued that clients have a right to a lawyer with “undivided loyalties.” It should not be necessary to prove after the fact that a conflicted lawyer failed to perform his task effectively.

Much of the argument in this case also focused on how to assess the judge’s performance.

Judge Aundria D. Foster not only assigned Saunders to the case, but apparently did not disclose the conflict of interest to Mickens or to any of the parties at the trial.

The outcome shows again that the high court majority is reluctant to second-guess verdicts years later.

Scalia’s opinion upholding the death sentence was joined by his usual allies: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

Besides Stevens, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented.