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The Supreme Court has given an Alabama death row inmate another chance to fight his execution by a seven-to-two vote. The court ruled that convicted murderer Cory Maples, through no fault of his own, was denied the right to appeal because he had been abandoned by his lawyers. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Cory Maples was convicted of murdering two friends and sentenced to death. There's no doubt that he committed the crime. The doubt is whether he could have avoided the death penalty if he'd been properly represented at trial. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that he had been denied the right to make that case when his appellate lawyers quite literally abandoned him. Alabama, almost alone among the states, does not provide post-conviction appeals lawyers for indigent defendants in capital cases.
The gap is filled almost entirely by public interest organizations or large out-of-state law firms that take on these cases on a pro-bono basis. This case involves one of those firms, New York Sullivan and Cromwell, which prides itself on its pro-bono work, but here committed a stunning series of mistakes that until today denied Maples the right to challenge the fairness of his trial.
In 2001, Sullivan and Cromwell took on the Maples appeal. In 2002, the two junior associates working on the case left the firm for government jobs that barred them from further work on the case. The lawyers did not tell Maples of their departure, nor did they advise the Alabama courts and Sullivan and Cromwell did not seek to substitute other lawyers in their place. In 2003, the Alabama trial court, without holding a hearing, denied Maples claim that his trial lawyers had failed to provide a minimally acceptable defense.
That started the appeals clock ticking. Sullivan and Cromwell had 42 days in which to file an appeal. But when the clerk at the court sent the notice to the New York firm, the two lawyers were long gone and the mailroom sent the envelopes back unopened with the words return to sender, left firm, prominently written on the outside. Back in Alabama, the court clerk simply filed the unopened envelopes and did not seek to contact the lawyers at the home addresses she had for them.
Up to this point, Maples was blissfully unaware of his own predicament, but in August of 2003, the state attorney general's office sent him a letter in prison notifying him that he'd missed the deadline for his appeal. Maples then called his mother. She called Sullivan and Cromwell and the law firm embarked on a mad scramble to correct its error. But all the state and federal appeals courts said too bad, Maples was out of luck. He defaulted on his right to appeal by missing the deadline.
Today, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maples is entitled to his appeal because he was abandoned by his lawyers. Writing for a seven justice majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that while a lawyer's failure to meet a deadline is not usually grounds for giving a defendant a second chance to file, this case is different. In these circumstances, she said, no just system would lay the default at Maples' death cell door.
Dissenting were justices Scalia and Thomas. Ginsburg, in her majority opinion, tracked the progress of the Maples case from the start. She noted that although death penalty cases are time intensive, taking on average about 1,500 hours pre-trial preparation, Alabama, at the time of the trial, capped at $1,000, the fee for work out of court. The Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers had prepared an appeal claiming, among other things, that because Maples court-appointed trial lawyers were so underfunded and inexperienced, they failed to take advantage of the state's evidence of Maples extreme intoxication.
And clearly, if used properly, would have been mitigating evidence that might have prevented a death sentence. After today's ruling, appellate lawyers will have the chance to make that case. Such claims are tough to win, but experts said today Maples at least has a shot at it now. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.