Death Row Cases Rife With Bad Lawyering, Harvard Group Warns

One lawyer drunk in court, another struggling with mental illness, and several who missed deadlines, failed to visit clients and continued their representation despite the appearance of conflicts of interest: this is the kind of ineffective lawyering that peppers the records of eight Arkansas men sentenced to death, including one who was executed last week and two executed this week, according to Harvard Law’s Fair Punishment Project. The project has released a report, “Prisoners on Arkansas’s Execution List Defined by Mental Illness, Intellectual Disability, and Bad Lawyering.” It says that all eight cases featured “quality of lawyering that … falls short of any reasonable standard of effectiveness.” In one case, the group found no evidence that lawyers conducted a thorough life history investigation, a basic staple of effective representation in a death penalty case. Another inmate scored low enough on an IQ test to be considered intellectually disabled, but never received a comprehensive mental health evaluation by an independent expert. In at least five of the cases, the jury heard none of the mitigating evidence, which included histories of rape, abuse and psychological torture.

Ledell Lee, who was executed last week, “has received inadequate representation at every stage of his case,” the group wrote. His first lawyer had substance abuse problems, and was “impaired to the point of unavailability on one or more days of the hearing.” The Arkansas Supreme Court recognized that Lee received grossly inadequate representation, but his new legal team missed the filing deadline for his appeal, and refused to accept Lee’s phone calls and ignored his letters. In June 2016 Lee’s local habeas lawyer withdrew from the case to retire, and said she had not worked on the case in ten years.

Taken together, the Harvard group writes, “These cases present a foundational challenge to the legitimacy and integrity of the death penalty in Arkansas.” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson scheduled four double executions over an 11-day period this month because a crucial lethal injection drug was set to expire. The first three executions were cancelled because of court decisions, then Lee was executed last week, and Jack Jones and Marcel Williams were both killed April 25.