Some in N.C. get lackluster defense

New standards aim for better counsel

RALEIGH -- Until a month before his trial, death row inmate Levon Junior Jones' attorney did not interview any witnesses, file any motions, seek an evaluation of his client, gain access to the prosecutor's file or conduct any investigation into Jones' background.

Jones was found guilty in the 1990 murder of Leamon Grady. He was convicted based on the testimony of a former girlfriend who gave inconsistent statements. No physical evidence tied him to the crime scene. And his attorneys failed to take make use of evidence available to them in the prosecutors' files implicating another man in Grady's murder.

A Superior Court judge and the N.C. Supreme Court upheld Jones' death sentence, finding no merit to his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.

Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence W. Boyle disagreed. "Counsel's deficient conduct undermines any confidence in the jury's verdicts," Boyle wrote in his September ruling. He granted Jones a new trial.

But Jones' case is rare in North Carolina, according to legal experts.

Deficiencies noted

"It's very uncommon for the courts to find ineffective assistance of trial counsel," said Mark Kleinschmidt, one of Jones' appellate lawyers and executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative, a Durham-based nonprofit group that trains young lawyers to litigate death penalty cases.

"There are many people currently on death row whose lawyers did not do an adequate job. ... There are numerous courts who seem unwilling to tackle the problem and grant relief," said Thomas Maher, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit law firm in Durham.

Many courts, Maher said, find merit to claims that defense lawyers didn't do enough but then rule that it would not have changed the jury's mind.

A recent study concluded that at least 37 inmates on North Carolina's death row had trial attorneys who would not meet today's standards for lawyers appointed to death penalty cases. The study also concluded that at least 16 people executed since 1977 did not have attorneys with today's minimum qualifications.

"Those are terrible injustices," said David Mills, executive director of the Common Sense Foundation, a think tank in Raleigh that conducted the study.

Recent changes

In 2000, the legislature created Indigent Defense Services, a state agency to oversee lawyers appointed to represent poor criminal defendants, including those facing the death penalty. The agency created a set of minimum qualifications for lawyers appointed in death penalty cases.

Under state law, a capital murder defendant is entitled to two lawyers. IDS officials require one of those lawyers to have six years of litigation experience and to have handled two capital trials and two other murder cases. The second lawyer needs to have at least three years of litigation experience and to have handled four jury trials of any kind. Both lawyers have to be familiar with legal ethics, death penalty law, and medical and scientific evidence.

As a result of these changes, Maher said, people facing capital trials today in North Carolina, are getting better legal representation and more investigations into their personal histories.

Problems remain

Mills noted, however, that the improvements created by IDS do not help defendants who were sent to death row before lawyers were more closely screened. Mills also said the study's numbers were conservative because his group could only find information on the lawyers for 115 of 147 death row inmates, and for 30 of the 43 inmates executed since 1977. Mills said he suspects that with complete information, the number of defendants and executed inmates who had lawyers who would not meet today's qualifications would be higher.

"It's especially disturbing to us knowing there are almost certainly more," Mills said.