Last week I wrote an article about the death penalty, in which I focused on McCarver vs. N.C., my view on the case, and general thoughts about this cruel punishment for crime. Since I believe that the system of capital punishment is inherently unfair, I wanted to speak to someone who has worked with death penalty cases. This way, I would have more insight and a clearer sense of how these cases are handled. For this week as a follow-up, I spoke with Lisa McLeod, a professor of philosophy at Guilford College who has worked at a state agency public defenders office in California handling felony appeals and death penalty cases.“The politics of the agency were difficult” McLeod said. “Since it was state funded, the governor appointed the head of the agencies with people working for the governor under both sides. On a day-to-day basis it was not that awkward, but if we asked for money to do an investigation and they turned us down, we had to wonder what the motivation was for their finances.” McLeod said that the head of her agency was pro-death penalty. “Since it was a public defenders office, I felt that the governor had motivations for this appointment.

“To do a case properly you need a certain amount of money and resources, and states don’t devote that money to indigent defense,” McLeod said. She explained that the budget is not large enough in any death penalty case. She concluded, “If the head doesn’t want it to go well, it would be easy for them not to fund it.”
McLeod also told me that one of the first lines the indigents (poor persons accused of a crime) told her when she took their case on was, “I know who signs your paycheck.”
McLeod said the indigents thought, “if we were too successful they might not keep us around.”

I was not surprised to hear that the state agencies were arranged this way, but hearing McLeod tell me this made it more real and it had a deeper impact on me. I felt sad and it confirmed much of what I had heard about the handling of death penalty cases. I had researched the system of capital punishment and the defending of poor people for capital crimes in a JPS class last summer. In my research I became painfully aware of the inadequate adversary system in the United States.

I had read before that the state-funded prosecution side is more heavily funded and has a wide range of experts and investigators to help them with their case. When speaking to McLeod, she told me there were horror stories of when the state paid outside lawyers for a case and McLeod’s office received $50 per hour, which is extremely low for that kind of work. This seems so low to me that I wonder why any decent expert would get involved. McLeod also confirmed that the prosecutor’s side has a staff of investigators, which can get police to help them out and that this side is usually better set up. She said that even if both sides were to receive the same amount of funds, the prosecutor’s side would still be better off for these reasons.

A former defender of poor persons accused of a capital crime, McLeod offers her experience with this kind of work. This gives us a glimpse into one person’s experience working within the death penalty system, and looking at it as it is, without distortion.

For me, this confirms much of what I had heard and researched about the death penalty. The capital punishment system as it is set up in the United States is biased, as evident in McLeod’s experience, when both state agencies, the prosecution and defense, are set up by the governor who has appointed a pro-death penalty head at the agency of public defense. This is liable to be the case in other states; however the system is set up differently in each state and different limitations enacted by the Supreme Court apply.

Lastly, if both sides are not equally funded, or if one side has access to experts and investigators while the other does not or cannot afford them, this will determine the outcome of the case and clearly this is not a just system.