Word: holdman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...murderers with court-appointed lawyers were sentenced to death, against about a third of those represented by private attorneys. Amsterdam, who has argued eight capital cases before the Supreme Court, contends that "great lawyering at the right time would save virtually everybody who is going to be executed." Scharlette Holdman, director of Florida's Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, persuades volunteer lawyers to represent death-row inmates. "Every person sentenced to die comes from a case fraught with errors," she says. "If you're adequately represented you don't get death. It's that simple...
Aside from public defenders, there are only about a dozen attorneys working full time on behalf of the condemned. Court-appointed lawyers in most states are not required to stay on a murderer's case after a conviction. "Drunk lawyers, lazy lawyers, incompetent lawyers, no lawyers," says Holdman. "You can have all the correct issues for appeal, but if you don't have a good lawyer to raise them, they don't mean a damn thing." Of 2,000 death sentences imposed during the post-Furman decade, about half have been reversed or vacated by the courts...