What’s wrong with the defense representation Tennessee provides to indigent defendants facing the death penalty?
Many of the answers are in Pretend Justice – Defense Representation in Tennessee Death Penalty Cases, an article published in The University of Memphis Law Review by Bill Redick, Brad MacLean and Shane Truett of The Tennessee Justice Project.
Pretend Justice documents the systemic failure of Tennessee to provide effective representation to indigent defendants in capital cases. Tennessee’s failure to provide competent representation results in bad lawyering and a system that is unfair and unjust.
A Reform Agenda for Tennessee
In the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright (1966), the Supreme Court declared that certain bedrock principles are essential to the fairness of our criminal justice system. One of those principles is every defendant’s Constitutional right to effective counsel.
Unfortunately, the Tennessee indigent criminal justice system is seriously flawed in a number of ways.
- At least 75 percent of defendants facing criminal prosecution — and all inmates on Tennessee’s death row — are poor people who cannot afford lawyers.
- Indigent defense resources have not kept pace with Tennessee’s soaring incarceration rate. Defense lawyers for the indigent receive only a fraction of the resources available to prosecutors.
- The majority of defendants facing the death penalty receive woefully inadequate legal representation. More than one in four Tennessee death sentences set aside in recent years were due to unacceptably poor defense representation.
- Tennessee law lacks many of the necessary safeguards against wrongful convictions and unreliable sentencing.
