McDaniel Asks For Help In Death Penalty Appeals
In Little Rock, federal public defenders with deep pockets are straining Arkansas' ability to manage the number of death penalty appeals its lawyers have to handle, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel says.
"We are in a serious situation with regard to our ability to litigate capitol habeaus cases," the attorney general told the legislative Joint Budget Committee last week. "The public defender has unlimited resources and has taken a unique course in Arkansas to select state cases ... for their resources to be dedicated to."
Unlike many federal court jurisdictions, Arkansas allows federal public defenders to represent state death-row inmates, McDaniel said.
The attorney general said he has inquired of Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., what needs to be done to prohibit the practice in Arkansas, but he also asked the budget panel for an additional $400,000 to hire as many as two more attorneys and 2 investigators to help handle the caseload.
Separate legislation filed last week would designate the attorney general's office as a law enforcement agency, giving McDaniel's investigators access to the state's crime information network.
Before the budget committee, McDaniel asked lawmakers to approve Senate Bill 86 by Sen. Steve Faris, D-Malvern, that would appropriate $400,000 to his office this year from funds budgeted for the attorney general's office next fiscal year.
"I'm to the point of potentially losing lawyers who are so overtaxed that if they don't get some help they're talking about having to find another course of employment," McDaniel told lawmakers.
His office has 6 attorneys who handle death penalty cases.
Because the bill involves new employees, it was referred to the budget panel's personnel subcommittee.
Also last week, Sen. Robert Thompson, D-Paragould, filed Senate Bill 112, which would designate the attorney general's office a law enforcement agency.
Thompson said the legislation, filed at McDaniel's request, would allow attorney general's staff access to the Arkansas Crime Information Center. Only law enforcement agencies have access to the center under state law.
"In order to do a criminal background check on witnesses, in order do a criminal background check, you have to be a designated law enforcement agency," Thompson said. "This really is a cleanup bill because the federal government has already ruled, or decided, that the Arkansas attorney general's office is a law enforcement agency and allows NCIC (National Crime Information Computer) checks." Some 40 inmates are on death row in Arkansas, and about 35 of them are represented by the federal public defender, McDaniel said.
The past 2 years, McDaniel said, were especially busy for the attorneys on his staff who handle death penalty appeals.
Last fall, he said, his office was forced to depose an Australian who argued that based on his viewing of a video showing a convicted murderer's slaying of the victim, he believed the suspect was 2 inches shorter than the person condemned to death for the killing.
"This despite the video, the trial, the accomplices' testimony and testimony of the defendant," McDaniel said.
In 2007, after a federal judge issued stays in three executions set by the governor, the attorney general announced a voluntary moratorium on appealing federal court-ordered stays of executions until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Kentucky case challenging lethal injection.
In a 7-2 decision last May, the nation’s highest court ruled that the 2 Kentucky death-row inmates who filed the lawsuit failed to show the procedure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection is the most common method of execution in the United States.
Senate Bill 112 has been assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Julie Brain, chief of the federal public defenders’ office in Little Rock, declined comment last week.
(Source: The Morning News)
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