Supreme Court: Lawyers abandoned Alabama inmate

Ruling gives man on death row a chance to appeal

An Alabama death-row inmate deserves a new court hearing because his lawyers at a top-flight New York firm abandoned him, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a case one justice called "a veritable perfect storm of misfortune."

The court voted 7-2 to reverse a federal appeals-court ruling that cut off appeals for Cory Maples, who was convicted of killing two men execution-style in 1995. Maples missed a deadline to appeal when court notices to his lawyers at the Sullivan and Cromwell firm were returned unopened and a local clerk took no further action.

Deadlines usually are sacrosanct at the high court, where defendants typically are held responsible for the mistakes of their lawyers. But Maples' case is different because he is facing execution and his lawyers didn't simply err, they abandoned him, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion.

"Through no fault of his own, Maples, an inmate on death row, was left unrepresented at a critical time," Ginsburg said in an opinion that also criticized Alabama for using inexperienced lawyers and paying them poorly to represent defendants in death-penalty cases.

But Justice Samuel Alito, who often votes against criminal defendants, said in a separate opinion that Maples' circumstances were unique: "What occurred here was not a predictable consequence of the Alabama system, but a veritable perfect storm of misfortune."

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Scalia said the court should have stuck with its usual practice of holding defendants responsible for their lawyers' mistakes.

Wednesday's decision means a court will hear Maples' claims that his inexperienced trial lawyers did such a bad job that their work violated the Constitution's guarantee of representation.

Original report here




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