Mr. Fisher, who is African-American, was arrested in upstate New York and returned to Oklahoma, where he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. He faced execution if convicted, a prospect that, records show, his well-respected lawyer did little to avoid.
The lawyer, E. Melvin Porter, a civil rights advocate and the first African-American elected to the Oklahoma State Senate, later said that at the time he considered homosexuals to be “among the worst people in the world,” and Mr. Fisher to be a “very hostile client.”
Mr. Porter was shockingly ill-prepared for trial ”” “unwilling or unable to reveal evident holes in the state’s case,” a federal appellate court later noted, yet “remarkably successful in undermining his own client’s testimony.” He exhibited “actual doubt and hostility” about his client’s defense, the court said, and failed to present a closing argument, even though the state’s case “was hardly overwhelming.”
There really are two answers to these outrages that almost never get discussed. The first is the insanity of “prosecutorial immunity.†The idea that Prosecutors who are most often elected political figures keen on reelection and public pandering should be able to be shielded from the consequences of politically motivated or public appeasing prosecutions is absolutely insane. Prosecutors should get jail time for unprincipled prosecutions.
The second remedy is for judges to immediately void verdicts in which there is clear evidence of ineffective counsel and place the burden on prosecutors, not defendants, to undo it.
One of the major problems faced by the judicial system is the tendency of the public to judge the system by individual cases. No institution can withstand such scrutiny. This is a bad case and the system finally worked. For some reason this does not apply to health care, political parties or the media.
Reply to #1. and #2.
You are both right.
This is a poorly written article.
We learn nothing about the facts of the case. We learn nothing about the lawyers — were they appointed under rule 608? Did he actually commit the murder?
If not, why did he plead guilty to first degree murder?
If he did commit the murder then might I suggest that the “legal defense being bad” may not have been the case?
This is a bit like a physician being blamed for the bad outcome when a head gets chopped off. It’s hard to have good outcomes when the defendant is non-compliant, angry, abusive, and sullen — [i]and he actually did the crime.[/i]
Why are we supposed to feel guilty and sad when the man chopped someone in the neck with a bottle, killing him, got two lawyers provided for him at taxpayer expense, I should add, and those two lawyers put up a less than enthusiastic defense in part through their own fault and in part through the defendant’s????
Good grief — people get “bad lawyers” all the time, and they actually *pay* for them.
I am less than sympathetic. I *might* have been sympathetic had the article writer bothered to fill in some somewhat key details. But the article writer did not bother. Instead he wrote a stream of consciousness rambling piece long on the atmospherics about the hot wind and the verdant land, and very very very short on the actual details.
Ah well . . . I’ve always wanted to be a fiction writer too.
There are so many unanswered questions in the article. In addition to the ones brought up by Sarah (#4):
If he actually committed first-degree murder, why would Oklahoma release him from prison? It doesn’t seem to be a parole. Was the sentence time already served? If that is sufficient now, why was the original sentence death? Is he suing his two previous lawyers for malpractice? Can he do that? Is the Oklahoma bar investigating?
All in all, it is a terribly frustrating story to read. There is almost no real news in it.
I agree about the badly-written article. Astonishing coming from the NYT. Lots of unanswered questions. I have another, which your readers may be able to answer: can one state of the Union really, in law, banish a citizen from its borders? Surely there is a fundamental right to freedom of movement in the USA?
This sort of thing is the main (though not only) reason why I have (reluctantly) become an abolitionist. Both #s 2 & 4 make valid points. However there’s an important consideration when we are talking about capital punishment. If we screw up, we can’t fix it once they throw the switch. If a man is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison and we find out 20 yrs later, we can’t give him back the lost years. But we can apologize, let him out of jail and write him a check that guarantees he will never have to work again for the rest f his life.
And while #4 is correct, there are some details missing I would like filled in, there are enough provided that there is little doubt in my mind that Mr. Johnson did not get a fair trial at any point in this sad story. Not once but twice appellate courts ruled to that effect. And the conduct of the defense attorneys was described in sufficient detail to resolve any personal doubts.
Was he guilty? I don’t know. He plead guilty. But in all honesty after spending all that time on death row were I offered freedom in exchange for an admission of guilt, I can’t swear I wouldn’t lie through my teeth to get out of there.
The bottom line is that there is really only one argument for capital punishment that (depending on your moral views) might hold water. And that is the argument for retributive justice. But at what price? The death penalty is insanely expensive and it routinely takes decades in most states to execute anyone. Even then we are constantly running into cases like this one that demonstrate the alarming fallibility in our justice system for a penalty that is so utterly final.
There isn’t much incentive for prosecutors to admit they are wrong. They don’t have to. And there are lots if incentives for innocent people to plead guilty. If they plead guilty, they may get less of a sentence. The poor and unlucky are glibly expected to face the consequences even for crimes they didn’t commit.
If he is innocent, I don’t think I would blame him for being sullen or difficult. But even the guilty deserve a competent defense. It’s comes directly out of the theology of Imago Dei.