Redressing racism in the courts: The Rocky Myers case |
Redressing racism in the courts: The Rocky Myers case
The Constitutional guarantee that anyone accused of a crime has a right to the assistance of counsel has long been regarded as a key to fairness in the criminal justice system. Almost 100 years ago, in Powell v. Alabama, the Supreme Court explained that “The right of the accused, in a capital case, to have the aid of counsel for his defense … is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
As the court noted, that guarantee means that a lawyer must provide what it called “effective aid” to their client. “Even the intelligent and educated layman,” the court said, “requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him.”
Or as former Justice John Paul Stevens put it in 1984, “Of all the rights that an accused person has, the right to be represented by counsel is by far the most pervasive, for it affects his ability to assert any other rights he may have.”
In a case sure to please law professors seeking new examples for courses on legal ethics, on March 11 news broke that Rocky Myers, a Black man serving a prison term for killing a white woman in 1991, is asking the courts to consider whether a lawyer with deep ties to the Ku Klux Klan provided him with the kind of guidance that the Supreme Court envisioned in Powell.
They should answer with an unequivocal “no,” and the cout should grant Myers’s request for a new trial.
Lawyers in this country are expected to put aside their personal beliefs and to represent people whose views they may not share. But, as the New York City Bar........