Remember in 2005 when a man named Brian Nichols went into an Atlanta courtroom for a hearing and killed the judge, the court reporter, a deputy sheriff and a federal agent before taking a woman hostage*? Three years on, his case is still stalled in the Georgia’s courts.
Paul L. Howard, Jr., the district attorney of Fulton County, announced that he would seek the death penalty against Nichols. The case appeared to be open-and-shut: the first two murders, of the Judge and the court reporter, took place in front of several witnesses, and Nichols confessed to all four of the killings in statements to police. But almost three years later the case has stalled, caught in a bitter dispute over funding for Nichols’s defense team, which has so far been paid about $1.2 million by the state of Georgia. The state agency responsible for indigent defense has run out of money, and other cases are at risk of being delayed or derailed. Jury selection in Nichols’s trial, which began more than a year ago, has not been, and may never be, completed. The prosecutor has petitioned, so far unsuccessfully, to have the trial judge removed from the case and to change the defense team. During a recent hearing, the judge, Hilton Fuller, implored members of the public to “write me an anonymous letter” with suggestions about how to bring the case to trial. Some Georgia legislators, furious about the delays, have advocated impeaching Judge Fuller.
The Nichols case illustrates a troubling paradox in death-penalty jurisprudence: the more heinous a crime—and the more incontrovertible the evidence of a defendant’s guilt—the greater the cost of the defense may be. Death-penalty trials require juries not only to determine whether the defendant is guilty but also to make other complex moral judgments—why a defendant committed a crime, whether he is likely to do so again, what punishment fits the crime. Defendants are entitled to often costly expert assistance, including the services of psychiatrists, as they prepare their cases. Yet spending large sums of public money on the defense of capital cases is politically incendiary, and in Georgia the consequences may be cataclysmic. According to Stephen B. Bright, the senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta, “We are just now starting to see the ripple effect of Nichols. The question now is whether the whole thing is going to come crashing down.”
*For some reason, I remember The Purpose Driven Life being part of this story. I’m not sure why.
Death in Georgia [The New Yorker].
