Capital Defense Lawyer Explains Missed Appeal Deadline
A Texas death-penalty lawyer, called on yesterday to explain why he blew a deadline for filing an appeal, blamed a lack of time to prepare and his client’s increasingly erratic behavior.
It was the second time that lawyer David Dow was in the news for filing a late appeal. The first time, Dow criticized the chief judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Sharon Keller, for refusing to keep the courthouse open to accept a late emergency death-penalty appeal. This time, Dow was in the hot seat as the Court of Criminal Appeals ordered him to explain an “untimely filing” in a different case.
Keller did not participate in yesterday’s hearing. Dow was represented by University of Texas law professor Jordan Steiker, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
Dow’s client, Danielle Simpson, was executed on Nov. 18. Steiker told the court that Simpson’s erratic behavior had made the representation difficult. At one point, Simpson had sought to fire his former lawyer and at another point he sought to abandon all appeals.
Dow and his co-counsel didn’t obtain the case files, contained in 15 poorly organized boxes, until nine days before Simpson’s scheduled execution, Steiker said. At first Dow and his co-counsel planned an argument that their client could not be executed because of mental illness, but they later discovered a different claim that prosecutors had excluded black jurors.
“This is not a case in which the lawyers were sitting on this claim for months or years,” Steiker said.
