Opinion ID: 1695556
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: claims 1-3.

Text: We have this day denied post-conviction relief in the companion application. Accordingly, Claims 1-3 of the present appeal are controlled by our decision rendered today in Lockett II, No. 94-DP-0672, the companion post-conviction appeal. Specifically, these claims are time barred by virtue of the three (3) year statute of limitations set forth in § 99-39-5(2), and they are also successive writ barred by virtue of Miss. Code Ann. § 99-39-27(9). In short, each of the first three (3) claims made belatedly by Lockett is doubly barred. Lockett is presently represented by his fourth team of lawyers. He was represented at trial in 1986 by William O. Townsend, a sole practitioner and part-time public defender, and Cullen C. Taylor and William E. Andrews, III, private practitioners. On direct appeal to this Court in 1987, Lockett was represented by Clive A. Stafford Smith and Bryan A. Stevenson of Atlanta, Georgia. Rebecca L. Wiggs, a member of the Watkins and Eager law firm in Jackson represented Lockett in his first application for post-conviction relief filed in 1988 and denied by this Court in 1992. In this, his second, application for post-conviction relief, Lockett is represented in 1994 by James W. Craig and Julie Ann Epps, two attorneys with the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Center. We turn now, within the limited context of a double bar, to an individual examination of Lockett's two remaining claims, one implicating the sentence-determining phase and the other, the guilt-finding phase of Lockett's bifurcated trial for capital murder.