In a good reading of just how f***ed up this country is, the New York Times has a new article about the death penalty. It uses an example from the state of Georgia, a state so extreme to the right that ideologically it is little different from fascist Italy. It documents how a judge is being harassed by the stupid Georgia masses and the ultra-right republican legislature for actually being egg-headed enough to claim that defendants in death penalty cases should have adequate counsel. It goes to a national problem, the fact that death penalty defendants often have inadequate counsel. The corrupted Supreme Court has effectively put a stay on executions due to this issue. However, I have no doubt that the ultra-right majority will ensure that no changes occur. Or at least they will ensure that no changes occur that actually make it less likely that the innocent will be executed.
Wave after wave of convicted defendants, some subject to a pending execution and others subject to life in prision, are being exonnerated. Groups like the Innocence Project are going through libraries of court records, and reopening murder cases. Very often, the result is that convicted murderers are being proven innocent, and thus getting back their lives. The fact that this is so common proves that there are serious problems with the "justice" system in this country, and the capital punishment system in particular.
The New York Times article talks about a Georgia case where a man who admits killing several judicial officers is unable to get adequate defense counsel. Like all states, defendants who cannot afford counsel of their own are supposed to have access to public defenders. But the public defender programs in many states pay so little that it is almost impossible to find enough lawyers. In capital punishment cases, it usually takes a small army of lawyers in order to get a fair trial.
The case in the article involves a 54-count indictment, a team of five prosecutors, and 400 potential prosecution witnesses. The defense attorneys have to go through 32,000 pages of documents, as well as 400 hours of taped conversations. Finding a small army of competent lawyers, willing to spend years on a case like this while making a salary that often is not much higher than a Wal Mart clerk, is nearly impossible. And what did the ultra-right state of Georgia do about this? They cut funding for the public defenders program.
Lets just admit it. In this country, it is guilty until proven innocent. The ultra-right state of Georgia has, in this case, pretty much admitted that it has no interest in the facts of the case or any mitigating circumstances. The state has decreed him giulty, and therefore he is guilty.