Death In Georgia.(Brian Nichols' murder case )

On the morning of March 11, 2005, Brian Nichols embarked on one of the most notorious crime sprees in recent American history. Nichols, a thirty-three-year-old African-American, was being retried on rape charges in Atlanta and was in custody at the Fulton County Courthouse, where his first trial had ended in a hung jury. In a holding cell on the eighth floor, where he was changing into the street clothes that he was to wear in court, he overpowered a sheriff's deputy and stole her gun. Then Nichols entered the courtroom and shot and killed Judge Rowland Barnes as well as the court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau, before escaping down a stairwell. On the sidewalk outside the building, he shot and killed another deputy sheriff, Hoyt Teasley.

Nichols immediately became the object of a frenzied manhunt in the Atlanta area. Over the next few hours, he hijacked as many as five cars and, apparently while looking for shelter, murdered a federal agent, David Wilhelm. Finally, Nichols took as hostage a woman named Ashley Smith and held her in her apartment in the suburb of Duluth for seven hours, until she persuaded him to surrender to the authorities.

Paul L. Howard, Jr., the district attorney of Fulton County, announced that he would seek the death penalty against Nichols. The case appeared to be open-and-shut: the first two murders, of the Judge and the court reporter, took place in front of several witnesses, and Nichols confessed to all four of the killings in statements to police. But almost three years later the case has stalled, caught in a bitter dispute over funding for Nichols's defense team, which has so far been paid about $1.2 million by the state of Georgia. The state agency responsible for indigent defense has run out of money, and other cases are at risk of being delayed or derailed. Jury selection in Nichols's trial, which began more than a year ago, has not been, and may never be, completed. The prosecutor has petitioned, so far unsuccessfully, to have the trial judge removed from the case and to change the defense team. During a recent hearing, the judge, Hilton Fuller, implored members of the public to "write me an anonymous letter" with suggestions about how to bring the case to trial. Some Georgia legislators, furious about the delays, have advocated impeaching Judge Fuller.

The Nichols case illustrates a troubling paradox in death-penalty jurisprudence: the more heinous a crime--and the more incontrovertible the evidence of a defendant's guilt--the greater the cost of the defense may be. Death-penalty trials require juries not only to determine whether the defendant is guilty but also to make other complex moral judgments--why a defendant committed a crime, whether he is likely to do so again, what punishment fits the crime. Defendants are entitled to often costly expert assistance, including the services of psychiatrists, as they prepare their cases. Yet spending large sums of public money on the defense of capital cases is politically incendiary, and in Georgia the consequences may be cataclysmic. According to Stephen B. Bright, the senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta, "We are just now starting to see the ripple effect of Nichols. The question now is whether the whole thing is going to come crashing down."

In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled, in Gideon v. Wainwright, that indigent criminal defendants must be provided with lawyers free of charge. But the Court allowed local officials to decide whether to establish full-time staffs of defense lawyers for the poor or to assign private lawyers on a case-by-case basis, as well as to determine how much the government should pay for them. Until 2005, Georgia, like many states, lacked a coherent plan for providing attorneys. "Georgia has a hundred and fifty-nine counties, and each one had a different system of hiring lawyers for the poor," Bright told me.

For decades, Bright fought to change the system in Georgia and, over the years, developed the weary patience of a liberal in a conservative state. He has led the small, tenuously financed Southern Center for Human Rights for twenty-six years, overseeing a staff of nine lawyers who fight against the death penalty and for improved prison conditions. By the nineteen-nineties, the indigent-defense system, hobbled by cronyism, incompetence, and under-funding, had become an embarrassment for the state, and there was a broad consensus for reform. In the spring of 2003, the state legislature, with Bright's help, created public-defense offices for most of the state's forty-nine judicial circuits and a new agency, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, to oversee them. An office in Atlanta, now known as the Georgia Capital Defenders, was established to provide attorneys, all trained in the intricacies of death-penalty law, for indigent defendants in capital cases. In order to avoid the spectre of taxpayer money being used to pay for such an unpopular cause, the new law required that the defense lawyers' compensation be derived from fees assessed on plaintiffs in lawsuits and other participants in the court system.

The new regime went into effect on January 1, 2005. Ten weeks later, Brian Nichols was taken to the holding cell near the courtroom to change his clothes.