2010 murder maricopa county court records

2010 MURDER MARICOPA COUNTY COURT RECORDS TRIAL

He has been suspended from the practice of law three times. It “does not take the ‘best of the best’ or some kind of ‘dream team’,” but it does require “a team of specialist capital defense lawyers and investigators, preferably working in an office, that understand the very different way that a death penalty case must be litigated from its inception.”ĭaryl Gold, who represented nearly 1 in 5 of the people sent to death row in the entire state of Louisiana between 20, is one of those lawyers. “The impact of improved lawyering is striking,” Garrett said. In 2004, the state Legislature created a system of regional defender offices to handle trial-level capital cases. Law professor Brandon Garrett, who authored a study on the decline of the death penalty in Virginia, credits defense lawyers. Virginia used to lead the nation in per capita executions, but no one has been sentenced to death in the state since 2011. The quality of defense representation in capital cases has substantially improved in many places across the country. Twenty years ago, law professor Stephen Bright wrote that the death penalty in America was handed down not “for the worst crime, but for the worst lawyer.” Nathanial Carr, Herman Alcantar, and Refik Eler make it seem like nothing has changed. A fourth claim is pending before the Florida Supreme Court, and pointed questioning from the justices during argument last month suggests that Eler might be found ineffective once again. Douglas, the Florida Supreme Court found that Eler provided a third capital client with ineffective assistance. Eler did not conduct a “true follow-up on the matters indicated in the various reports” of his mental health expert, the court found, and he only “made a marginal attempt to present organic brain damage and other impairment as mitigation.” Shellito’s new lawyers discovered that he has bipolar disorder, “a mental age of fourteen or fifteen years, an emotional age of twelve or thirteen years, an IQ in the low-average range, the presence of organic brain damage,” “a prior head injury,” and that he endured “verified physical and sexual abuse.” In State v. In 2013, the Florida Supreme Court reversed death sentence of Michael Shellito on the grounds that he had ineffective assistance of counsel. He then broke into an apartment and shot two people while they were sleeping. Hours before the crime that landed him on death row, Womble voluntarily entered a mental health treatment facility, saying that he wanted to kill himself and possibly others, and yet was permitted to leave. He also had hallucinations that demons were living in his furniture. Womble developed severe depression, tried to kill himself, and had a paranoid delusion that a religious organization controlled his life. Instead of supporting his efforts, his mother, herself addicted to heroin and mentally ill, called him a “fucking retard” and beat him.

He also had a difficult time in school despite trying hard. He stuttered and suffered from head injuries, neuropsychological impairment, and symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. As a child, he was thrown down flights of stairs, beaten with a broomstick, and had his head slammed into a wooden fence. In post-conviction proceedings, Womble’s new lawyers have discovered that he was born addicted to the heroin that his mother abused while she was pregnant.

(Carr did not respond to requests for comment.) People who knew Carr at the county courthouse told Paul Rubin of the Phoenix New Times that “coaching seems Carr’s true passion.” Indeed, Carr “often was unavailable to clients and co-counsel on most weekday afternoons during football season-and always on game days.” This dual career did not stop Carr from billing the county an average of $370,000 per year for his services-even though some the hours he billed were for team meetings and prison visits that appear to be fictitious.

2010 MURDER MARICOPA COUNTY COURT RECORDS TRIAL

One of Carr’s capital clients, Daniel Garcia-Saenz, sent the trial judge a handwritten letter asking for Carr and his co-counsel to be removed from his case because he had “lost all trust and faith in my attorneys.” Saenz explained that his lawyers had visited him only a few times in 15 months and that he became concerned after hearing that Carr had been removed from two of his cases for failing to show up in court on his clients’ behalf.Ĭarr might not visit his capital clients very often, but he does seem to be dedicated to his job-his other job as a high school football coach.

2010 murder maricopa county court records