Looking out: Deals and incompetence
By Brandon Astor Jones
"They don't try to prove you innocent even if you is innocent. All they wanna do is make a deal that they think will keep 'em from fryin' you. They couldn't even do that for me ..." — James Daniels
The day they came to kill James Daniels many years ago, he made this statement — to no-one in particular — as he carried his personal things past my cell. His words from the past are filled with poignancy today.
On August 25, 1994, Jimmy Berry and Bruce Harvey were supposed to be representing Michael Wayne Kesserling's best legal interests in defence of his life at trial. Despite his protestations of innocence, his so-called "attorneys" were busy trying to sell him out via "a negotiated guilty plea". So sure was he that he could get a conviction against Kesserling, the prosecutor rejected that deal. Lucky for Kesserling that he did.
The trial took place in Marietta, Georgia, which has a reputation for seeking and getting death penalty convictions routinely. The city's prosecutors have failed only once, prior to this case, in getting every capital conviction they went after. So when the jury came back into the courtroom with a verdict of "not guilty", there were more than a few people surprised. With understandable relief, Kesserling said, "The system worked for a change".
But the Kesserling case was only an aberration. For in Cobb County, more often than not, the jury would have brought back a guilty verdict. Cobb County is so rife with neo-nazi intolerance that the 1996 Olympic Committee has elected to withdraw the previously planned games that were to be presented there.
Imagine what might have happened if Kesserling had been just a wee bit mentally retarded, or felt so bullied by the systematic railroading of the Cobb County judicial organisation that — like so many other defendants before him — he had placed his fate entirely in the wheeling and dealing attorneys' hands from day one. The result would have been at best spending the rest of his natural life in prison, and the worst being literally fried to death in Georgia's electric chair, as James Daniels was. (He was still alive after their first efforts to kill him. Several minutes later, with his chest still heaving and gasping for air, they threw the switch again.)
Indigent defendants, myself included, are forced not only to fight a billion dollar state-sponsored death machine, hell bent on putting us in that chair, but we also have to fight the attorneys that very same machine appoints to defend us because of their backroom dealings with that evil machinery — very often, without our permission to make deals. They grovel at the machine's feet. To say there is a conflict of interests in such behaviour, from the moment of the court's appointment onward, is an understatement.
Consider this factual example: Jimmy Berry and Michael Mears (Mears heads the Georgia Indigent Defense scheme, a program funded with a pittance of state money) presently represent me. In an effort to strengthen my defence, I personally gave Mears a letter sent to me from my strongest defence witness. In it she stated that her doctors had given her less than six months to live; she was dying of cancer. I told Mears that he needed to get a video deposition from her while she was still able and willing to testify. He agreed and said he would do it "soon". Mears did not depose her.
During that period, I wrote him several letters. In each I reiterated the request. In fact, people from as far away as Australia and elsewhere were writing letters on my behalf while friends and family members were calling his office — all to no avail. My friend died. Mears did not answer my letters nor did he or his office return the calls of my friends and family.
That is but one of many examples of how so-called attorneys sell us out whenever and wherever they can. Cobb County is a leading death penalty marketplace.
Georgia's prisons are chequered with people who placed their fate, out of ignorance and/or necessity, into such hands. We can be certain some of them ought not be in prison. The greater sadness is that some men have been killed — and soon will be killed — in Georgia's electric chair who were/are not guilty of anything more than trusting incompetent deal-making attorneys.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]