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"What the Supreme Court is saying now is states have got remarkably better at guaranteeing certain liberties," says Ira Robbins, a habeas corpus specialist at Washington's American University law school. In the state courthouses, where the trials are held, however, the guarantee of competent counsel looks rather threadbare. Some cities maintain public-defender offices % to provide attorneys to indigent defendants. Well-funded offices can often afford attorneys who specialize in criminal law and even capital crimes. But a number of states -- including several Southern states with the nation's highest execution rates -- use a shakier system of court-appointed lawyers selected from a list of local attorneys. Many are either young attorneys fresh out of school or older ones who ordinarily specialize in the bread-and-butter work of title searches or divorce litigation.
Though appeals courts have been lenient in ruling that defense attorneys have done an adequate job -- judges deemed meritless all of Coleman's claims of ineffective assistance by counsel -- it's the rare court-appointed lawyer who is skilled in the complexities of capital cases. "This is a highly specialized area of law," says Harold G. Clarke, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, who has reviewed many death sentences. "Even a good criminal lawyer may not have had much, if any, experience in capital cases." Court- appointed attorneys must also be willing to settle for modest fees that rarely cover the cost of a thorough defense. While a private attorney in Atlanta may make upwards of $75 an hour, court-appointed lawyers in Georgia are paid about $30 an hour. In Alabama they cannot be paid more than $1,000 for pretrial preparations. Even if they spend just 500 hours at the task -- the U.S. average in 1987 was 2,000 -- that amounts to $2 an hour. "The lawyer would be better off going to work at McDonald's," says Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Many of them are also unhappy to find themselves defending accused killers whose victims may be familiar to their neighbors. Nor does it help to know that, if convicted, their clients will have an incentive to turn against them later. Claims of ineffective counsel are a staple of appeals filings -- not only because mediocre lawyering is so common but also because the accusation is a reliable way to gain the attention of appeals courts. That's one reason prosecutors and some defense attorneys scoff at claims that capital-case lawyering is all that bad. "The competency-of-counsel issue has been totally blown out of proportion," says Marvin White Jr., a Mississippi assistant attorney general. "Counsel in the majority of cases has been competent and effective."