The aim of the conference is to share information and strategies as well as to explain the process of representing a death row inmate. The daylong training conference will be followed by a series of quarterly meetings to discuss new developments and ideas in death penalty litigation. Harcourt hopes that the conference will help convince more Boston-area lawyers to litigate death penalty cases pro bono, a service he believes the legal profession has an obligation to provide. I believe that lawyers have a professional obligation to make sure these cases are reviewed adequately. During his years with the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center, now the Alabama Equal Justice Initiative, located in Montgomery, Harcourt discovered that defendants frequently are sentenced to death lightly.
Justice is swift, often inappropriately so.
According to Harcourt, the average length of a death penalty case in Alabama is three to four days, from jury selection to sentencing, and often there is no one to insist on the defendant's legal rights. Much of the problem stems from the fact that Alabama has no public defender system, Harcourt said. Instead, the court appoints local attorneys, many of whom have no criminal law experience, to represent indigent defendants. In one case he worked on, a lawyer was given the defendant's uncashed paycheck as a piece of exonerating evidence. Instead of entering it in the court, he simply cashed the check and pocketed the money.