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"Georgia capital cases in US Supreme Court crosshairs"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this new AP article, which gets started this way: The U.S. Supreme Court has stepped into four Georgia death penalty cases in the last year or so, and it could yet again intervene ? this time over a defendant who said he languished in jail because the state couldn't pay his lawyers. It's the latest test for Georgia's justice system, which has come under scrutiny in recent years. The state's new public defender program has had funding trouble ever since it spent $3 million in 2008 defending Brian Nichols, the man convicted of killing a judge, court reporter, sheriff's deputy and federal agent during a 2005 rampage at an Atlanta courthouse.  And the Georgia Supreme Court has been criticized for not reviewing death penalty appeals closely enough...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 18, 2010 (boomark / email).