The Daily Press, via Associated Press
From the New York Times comes a story about a lawyer who revealed a secret 10 years after the fact, that altered one man’s death sentence into life in prison.
Read about it below.
For 10 years, Leslie P. Smith, a Virginia lawyer, reluctantly kept a secret because the authorities on legal ethics told him he had no choice, even though his information could save the life of a man on death row, one whose case had led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.
Mr. Smith believed that prosecutors had committed brazen misconduct by coaching a witness and hiding it from the defense, but the Virginia State Bar said he was bound by legal ethics rules not to bring up the matter.
But the situation changed last year, when Mr. Smith took one more run at the state bar’s ethics counsel. “I was upset by the conduct of the prosecutor,” Mr. Smith wrote in an anguished letter, “and the situation has bothered me ever since.”
Reversing course, the bar told Mr. Smith he could now talk, and he did. His testimony caused a state court judge in Yorktown, Va., to commute the death sentence of Daryl R. Atkins to life on Thursday, citing prosecutorial misconduct.
It was in Mr. Atkins’s case that the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the Constitution bars the execution of the mentally retarded. But Virginia continued to pursue the death penalty against him, saying he was not mentally retarded. If Thursday’s decision stands, that issue may never be resolved.
Wow. This reveals some problems with legal ethics and the standards of state bars. Legally, whether or not Smith could really talk about it was iffy, and he could potentially risk his liscence by speaking about this without the sanction and consent of his bar. But it is shocking that this could happen.
Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at George Mason University, said the rules in Virginia were murky about what lawyers in Mr. Smith’s position could do. But if the bar’s initial advice was correct, Professor Rotunda added, “there is something wrong about the law, particularly if you are talking about execution or years in prison.”
Richard G. Parker, a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington who represented Mr. Atkins along with Joseph A. Migliozzi Jr., praised Mr. Smith. “He had no dog in this fight,” Mr. Parker said. “Les Smith brooded on this and came out and said something to do the right thing.”
Executions in Virginia usually occur within seven years of the imposition of a death sentence, legal experts there said. So in a typical case — without the intervention of the Supreme Court — Mr. Atkins would be dead by now and Mr. Smith’s revelations would have done him no good.
At least the lawyer tried again to tell the truth, and it was in time. Only his morality drove him to telling the truth, and fortunately he was allowed to reveal what really happened.
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