McClatchy News series documents poor capital representation in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia:  Inspired by the case of Mississippi death row inmate Ronnie Lee Connor, Stephen Henderson of McClatchy Newspapers has written a three-part series carried in several news outlets on Sunday documenting in detail the poor quality of defense representation in capital cases in Alabama, MIssissippi, Georgia and Virginia.  (Some papers are running a summary of the series, as here.)

• Part 1 | Lawyers in key death penalty states often fall short 
• Part 2 | Appeals courts often overlook lawyers' errors 
• Part 3 | group of young lawyers is some prisoners' only hope
• Graphic | The appeal process 
• Graphic | Active death penalty states
• Graphic | Supreme Court rulings on a lawyer's duty
• Mississippi case inspired death penalty investigation

Excerpt form Part 1:
...A broad review by McClatchy Newspapers of recent death-penalty cases in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia provides, for the first time, an assessment of how commonplace these failures have become.

McClatchy reviewed trial transcripts and appeal records and interviewed lawyers for 80 men and women who were sentenced to death from 1997 through 2004 in those four states. The review found that:

• In 73 of the 80 cases, defense lawyers gave jurors little or no evidence to help them decide whether the accused should live or die. The lawyers routinely missed myriad issues of abuse and mental deficiency, abject poverty and serious psychological problems.
• By failing to investigate their clients' histories, lawyers in these 73 cases fell far short of the 20-year-old professional standards set by the American Bar Association. Their performances also appear inconsistent with standards that the U.S. Supreme Court has mandated several times.
• Appeals courts for the most part have ducked those Supreme Court directives about the importance of quality defense counsel. So far, only two of the 80 death sentences have been overturned for bad lawyering.
• In 11 of the cases, the defendants already have been executed. Their cases moved through the appeals process without a single judge flagging lapses in the defense attorneys' performances.
• In Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi, this poor legal representation is a result of official policy. The states pay no more than a pittance to help lawyers defend their clients, and none requires that well-trained attorneys handle death cases.
• Georgia had a similarly inadequate system until 2005, when a publicly funded, statewide capital defenders office began spending whatever is necessary to scour clients' backgrounds for mitigating evidence. So far, none of that office's 46 clients has been sentenced to death.

Overall, the 80 cases that McClatchy reviewed show how poorly these four key death-penalty states fulfill a basic constitutional principle. ...pt. 1 cont'd