 "Photo: Caleb Miller, Daily Texan Staff")
The UT Capital Punishment Clinic marked Thursday its 20th year of advocating for proper legal representation for impoverished Texans on death row, and what District Judge Charlie Baird called “the preservation of human life.”
More than 400 UT law students work with the clinic on numerous capital cases.
About 50 people attended the event, and guest speakers included judges and human rights specialists.
“I wanted to learn more about capital punishment because I want to actually work on death penalty cases,” said Daniel Aguilar, a second-year law student. “[The capital punishment system] is one of the greatest injustices.”
Overly technical rules and inadequate lawyers have led to wrongful convictions, said Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a group that advocates legal representation for the poor.
“There is nothing less popular than defending someone on death row, than defending a person facing the executioner, especially in Texas,” Bright said. “But we need to more than ever in Texas.”
Texas leads the nation in executions, with 421 recorded since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Bright said Harris County alone has performed more executions in the past 40 years than Virginia, the second-leading state.
Bright referenced cases involving inadequate legal representation, including Burdine v. Johnson, in which the defendant’s lawyer slept through the trial, and another case in which a lawyer lifted arguments for an appeal from his client, a man with a reported eighth-grade education.
Though skilled lawyers exist, mediocre practice and technicalities turn capital punishment into a luck-of-the-draw situation, he said.
“Death penalty is based on the worst of lawyers,” Bright said. “What kind of lottery system is that?”
The clinic won each of the four of the cases it presented before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007.
Judge Patrick Higginbotham, a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, also addressed the importance of quality legal representation.
Higginbotham described capital punishment as complex and full of pitfalls. He said skill is required to represent the defendant in a capital case, and lawyers must find a narrative by which they can present a client as “a person, not a monster or abstract figure.”
“We can afford to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, spend $700 billion to bail out the greediest, but cannot reform the legal system into something to be proud of,” Higginbotham said.
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