ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

Using the example of the infamous convicted Georgia murderer Brian Nichols, Jeffrey Toobin examines the “troubling paradox” of death penalty jurisprudence:  the more heinous a crime and the more incontrovertible the evidence of guilt, the greater the cost to the defendant and, in cases of indigent defendants, the state.

In an unrelated death penalty case in Atlanta, a judge replaced the defendant’s two experienced private defense attorneys with local, less costly public defenders in an effort to solve funding problems.