Lawsuit Seeks to Halt Hundreds of Cases

A lawsuit filed against state officials calls for prosecutions in a number of northeast Georgia cases to be halted. The lawsuit filed Tuesday in Elbert County maintains that hundreds of defendants unable to afford their own lawyers are not being provided representation. The Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights is pursuing the case on behalf of five Elbert County defendants. The lawsuit highlights funding problems plaguing Georgia's public defender system.

(Associated Press)

New challenge to sex offender law

Critics of Georgia's sweeping crackdown on sex offenders asked a federal judge today to allow sex offenders to volunteer at churches. The Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights claims the current ban contradicts the right to participate in prayer worship. The center said one offender in Glynn County faced prosecution for playing the piano during a regular Sunday service. The law also bans sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, gyms, swimming pools and the state's 150,000 school bus stops.

(Associated Press)

Lawyers rally for Ga. public defender system

Several of Georgia's most prominent defense attorneys on Thursday urged a Fulton County judge to keep an ailing public defender program from firing four full-time attorneys.
Contract staff would replace the lawyers.

The program created a statewide network of full-time attorneys to represent Georgia's poor.

Critics say the move could set an "unconscionable" precedent. They say the step threatens the program's mission by slipping back to a much-maligned system of contract attorneys that once represented Georgia's indigent.

"This is not about the right of lawyers to have a job," said Stephen Bright, director of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. "It's about the right of clients to be represented."

But the system's administrators facing budget cuts say their hands are tied, and replacing permanent attorneys with private sector staffers is a necessary reality in a tough economy.

"It's sad for the four lawyers who got laid off. It's certainly unfortunate," said Devon Orland, a state attorney. "But in this state, there's no right to have a job."

The indigent defense program was created in 2003 to replace a patchwork system in which some counties assigned indigent defense cases to attorneys with little experience or knowledge of criminal defense.

The new statewide system started in 2005 and was applauded in legal circles, but it has earned only lukewarm support from state legislators. Concerned that administrators are mismanaging public dollars, they have cut funding to the system from $42 million to $35 million over the last three years.

Fulton Superior Court Judge Melvin Westmoreland is expected to rule in the case next week.

Click here for more GPB News about Georgia legal affairs.

(The Associated Press)

Georgia sex offender law challenged

The Southern Center for Human Rights has filed a lawsuit to stop Georgia’s new sex offender law from going into effect.
Georgia lawmakers amended the state's sex offender law this year adding a provison that prohibits those on the sex offender registry from volunteering at a church.

Sarah Geraghty is an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights. She says it would make things like singing in church choirs or cooking meals in the church kitchen a crime.

People who abuse children shouldn't work with children in a church setting, but a blanket prohibition preventing 15 thousand people on the registry from participating in church activity is not the answer," Geraghty says. She says the law violates freedom of religion and she believes it is unconstitutional.


Geraghty says the problem is that Georgia’s sex offender registry makes no distinction between teenagers engaging in consensual sex and child predetors.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is a woman who is on the registry because when she was 17 she had consensual sex with a 15 year old. The new law goes into effect July 1st. The Southern Center for Human Rights is asking for an injuction.

State moving fast to resume executions

Georgia, which became the nation's first to hold an execution after the Supreme Court upheld lethal injections, is now attempting its third in just a month.

Meanwhile, only two other states - Mississippi and Virginia - have put inmates to death.

The moves come after a seven-month nationwide halt on executions while the court considered the constitutionality of the method.

That's about to change. Texas, which has led the nation in executions since the 1970s, has 14 scheduled into the fall. And eight other states have set execution dates before the summer's end, according to Capital Defense Weekly, a Web site for death penalty lawyers.

Why was Georgia so quick out of the box?

Experts say Georgia has a shorter waiting period - a maximum of just 29 days - than some other states to move forward with an execution once a death warrant is signed. Once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that the three-drug lethal injection method used by most states was constitutional, Georgia was able to move with almost no delay.

And there were already several cases in the pipeline when the high court took up the lethal
injection challenge. The backlog was created in part because Georgia held only one execution between 2006 and 2007.

"In some ways, it's the luck of the draw," said Georgia Department of Corrections spokesman Paul Czachowski.

William Earl Lynd's execution on May 6 was the first in the nation after the April Supreme Court ruling. He was convicted of killing his live-in girlfriend in Berrien County two decades ago.

Samuel David Crowe was scheduled to die on May 22 but had his sentence commuted to life in prison without parole just hours before he was to be put to death.

The state is set to move forward with its third execution on Wednesday for Curtis Osborne, for killing a Spalding County couple in 1990.

Bill Hoffmann, an attorney representing Osborne, said he can't fault the state for its aggressive strategy.

"We had a stay awaiting the decision, and now it's been lifted," he said. "The state's gotta do what the state's got to do."

Still, Sara Totonchi of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said she's been surprised by the fast early pace Georgia has set.

"Why the rush?" she asked. "Is this really an area where Georgia wants to be leading the nation?"

Prosecutors dispute that the state is moving quickly at all, noting that Lynd, Crowe and Osborne have each been on death row for almost two decades.

"What rush? Just look at how old these cases are," said Rick Malone, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia.

There's no denying that politics also plays a role in the scheduling of death penalty cases, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

He said "informal slowdowns" take place in states where politicians are less enthusiastic about capital punishment, while cases move more quickly in states where influential leaders are in favor of the death penalty.

"I would say the political shifts in Georgia favor executions and so you are seeing that," he said.

Even if more executions are scheduled in Georgia this year it's unlikely the state will surpass the record of 23 conducted in 1935, when the Georgia's death row was using the electric chair.

Four executions were performed in both 2001 and 2002. That's the highest number since the state adopted lethal injection as its method of execution in October 2001.

Click here for more GPB News coverage of the issue of capital punishment.

(The Associated Press)