Pennsylvania’s chief justice wants the state Supreme Court to ban lawyers at an organization that currently handles many appeals by convicted murderers on the state’s death row.
Chief Justice Ronald Castille took that position in a rare single-justice opinion issued late on Wednesday that resolved a number of issues surrounding an earlier one.
In both opinions, Castille took aim at the Philadelphia-based Federal Community Defender Office (FCDO), writing that the group has engaged in abusive and unethical practices that warrant removing its lawyers from all Pennsylvania cases.
“This court has a responsibility for the entire Pennsylvania judicial system, to ensure the delivery of swift, fair and evenhanded justice in all cases,” Castille said. “We are not obliged to indulge or countenance a group which manipulates and abuses the judicial process in Pennsylvania in the hopes of achieving a global political result that it has failed to secure through the political process.”
Pennsylvania has 181 men and three women on death row. It has executed three people since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s; all three had relinquished their appeals. The state’s last execution was in 1999.
The Federal Community Defender’s Office is a division of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which responded forcefully on Thursday evening to the justice’s criticism. In a statement, association chairman David Rudovsky and the group’s lawyer, David Richman, said the office’s defense lawyers have succeeded in obtaining new trials or new sentences for defendants in an extraordinary number of cases.
“With the exception of one or two clients who gave up the right to fight their cases, none of its Pennsylvania state capital clients has ever been put to death,” they wrote. “That record by itself refutes any charge that the FCDO engages in frivolous litigation.”
Atlantic Center for Capital Representation director Marc Bookman, who also represents death penalty defendants in Pennsylvania, said his group and the Federal Community Defender Office both try to give the best possible representation for those facing execution.
“Three justices from Justice Castille’s own court labeled the Pennsylvania death penalty in ‘disarray’ — given these real problems, the amount of time and energy Justice Castille is personally putting into this issue is surprising,” Bookman said in an e-mailed response.
Castille, a Republican and former Philadelphia district attorney, must retire at the end of this year because he turned 70 in March.
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