Death Penalty Appeal Without a Lawyer

June 11, 2007 — -- It took an Alabama jury less than 30 minutes to convict Larry Smith of murder and recommend that a judge send him to his death.

With his life at stake and his last appeal deadline fast-approaching, Smith found a white-shoe Washington, D.C., law firm to take his case for free. His Washington attorneys discovered that Smith's trial lawyer had never shown the jury evidence that suggested Smith might be innocent. They persuaded a judge earlier this year to grant Smith a new trial.

In almost any other state in the nation, the government would have provided Smith a free attorney to challenge the fairness of his trial. Alabama is one of only two states in the country that does not provide poor death row inmates with lawyers for post-conviction review of their cases.

A dozen of the nearly 200 Alabama death row inmates are without lawyers, according to Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.

"It's shameful and it's a disgrace," said Bill Bowen, a former judge on Alabama's Court of Criminal Appeals. "This is the last stage. If you have any chance at all, it has to be asserted by an attorney now before you're strapped to the gurney."

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court could announce whether it will hear an appeal by a group of Alabama inmates, represented by Stevenson, asking the court to establish a constitutional right to a lawyer for death row inmates in post-conviction reviews.

The Constitution guarantees a lawyer for poor criminal defendants during their trials and their first round of appeals. So-called post-conviction reviews, on the other hand, are civil cases brought to challenge the fairness of a conviction or sentence — defendants have no established constitutional right to a lawyer in such cases.

But, post-conviction reviews are often the only way to challenge a death sentence based on newly discovered evidence, such as DNA evidence, a biased jury, or — as in Smith's case — an incompetent trial lawyer. They have resulted in hundreds of exonerations or reduced sentences nationwide, and every state other than Alabama has opted to provide death row inmates with free lawyers for those appeals.

A 'Woefully Inadequate' Defense

As the police led Larry Smith to a patrol car, one of the arresting officers turned to Smith and said, "We're going to fry your a--," Smith testified at trial.

Indeed, the evidence seemed compelling. In his trial in Albertville, Ala., the jury heard a witness testify that Smith had hatched a plan to rob friend Dennis Harris and Smith had signed a confession, admitting that he shot Harris in the head for $200.

But when it came time for Smith's defense, court records show, the jury didn't hear the whole story.