Wanted: An attorney to represent a Utah man condemned to death.
Must be licensed to practice law in the state of Utah and meet the state’s special qualifications for death penalty cases.
The pay is about $125 per hour — but co-counsel in one case will warn you, there’s been trouble actually getting paid. And the last guy who had the job? He left because payment issues and threatened disciplinary sanctions took a toll on his health.
Nine men are currently on Utah’s death row. Two of them — 61-year-old Floyd Maestas and 59-year-old Douglas Lovell — currently have no qualified lead attorney representing them as they appeal their capital murder convictions in state court.
And while the Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers isn’t telling its members to not apply for the job, it’s not exactly encouraging them to do so either.
Executive Director Stewart Gollan said the organization has “strongly encouraged” its members to think carefully about what they’re signing up for if they take on either case. An attorney should consider the “significant practical and ethical bind” they might put themselves in by signing onto a complicated and weighty death penalty appeal, he said, given past defense attorneys’ issues with getting compensated for their own work or funding to hire experts.
“There seems to be some pretty significant financial limitations that are being imposed to the attorneys representing the defendant,” Gollan said. “These [cases] are extremely burdensome on the attorney. Our concern is that, certainly, it puts attorneys in a bind and it also is not in the interest of the defendant.”
Anyone who is charged with a crime that includes the possibility of jail time — in Utah, that is anything more serious than an infraction — is entitled to an attorney, even if they can’t afford one. For death penalty cases, those attorneys must be experienced and qualified under court rules.
Utah is one of two states in the nation that delegates the responsibility to provide defense lawyers to individual counties and cities.
There are two ways in which Utah’s counties are funding defense lawyers in death penalty cases: Most pay into a state-managed fund, a sort of insurance policy from which officials can request money if they have a death penalty-eligible case in their county.
But five of the state’s 29 counties — Salt Lake, Weber, Summit, Wasatch and Utah — don’t pay into the fund, according to Utah court officials. Instead, each of those counties uses its own money to contract with individual attorneys.
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Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, Jessica Miller, September 18, 2017
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
