A bit of morbid curiosity today, I suppose. Does anyone here have any experience working in death-penalty cases, prosecution or defense? If so, care to discuss?
Personally, I can’t imagine working in capital defense. I’ve lost when the stakes were far, far less than that, and seeing the impact on my client was heartbreaking. Knowing that, if you screw up, your client could die - in fact, could die even if you do everything right - there’s no way I could handle that. And as for the prosecution side - I don’t know how I could have the absolute confidence needed to stand before a jury and ask them to sentence a man to death.
Argued two Capital cases on appeal, appeal allowed in one, dismissed in the other but sentence reduced to life in prison, which on the facts was about as good as I was going to get.
No not freaked out, I take my duties as a Barrister seriously and I know my blunder could have an adverse impact on my clients in all cases, not just capital one.
Worked on two capital cases (three if you count assisting on a capital case as a law school intern), on both sides of the aisle. Neither case ended up warranting the death penalty, nor should they have.
I defended a schizophrenic (though adequately medicated) young man who got drunk and ran over his fiance. It is a long, tragic story, but it quickly became clear that the police were fed a line by the victim’s (also drunk and partially responsible) parents that underlyed the initial belief in premeditation. In the end, as the facts became known, it quickly became obvious that the more appropriate charge was involuntary vehicular homicide. The Defendant pled guilty to that charge (against my and my collegue’s advice) due to his extreme sadness and remorse over his role in the death of the love of his life.
I was a very minor (brief writing) player as an intern during a prison murder capital case. In the end, he pled to life without parole.
Recently, I was hired as a part-time consultant/attorney to assist the local prosecutor with a death penalty case involving the murder of a 7 year old mentally challenged boy who was killed during a sexual assault by his step-father. A truly horrific case made DP eligible as a felony murder. There were some evidentiary problems, but in the end, the consensus was that, no matter how henious, the death penalty should not be imposed when death wasn’t intended. He is serving life plus 25, now.
I have handled about a dozen murder cases on both sides. Few are charged as death penalty cases, and I have never had one that should be. I am now generally against the death penalty in the abstract as a huge waste of time and resources when a life without parole sentence seems harsher to me. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I live in one of the reddest states in the US, and there has been only one execution in the state since 76 (a second cousin of mine) and only one sitting on death row today.
The work is very taxing, and the most disturbing thing I found was that you get so focused on the work that you rarely consider the ethics or morality of the larger issues.