Former FBI Chief Calls Death-Row Inmate’s Defense ‘Woefully Deficient’
Photo courtesy of
Holland & Knight.
Former FBI director William S. Sessions in an op-ed published today blasts the lawyer who represented death-row inmate Curtis Osborne.
Osborne is scheduled to die tomorrow after a denial of his final bid for clemency by a Georgia pardons board. He was convicted of killing two people in a dispute over $400.
Sessions writes in a column published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Osborne’s court-appointed lawyer, Johnny Mostiler, offered a defense that was “woefully deficient.” One cloud over the case, Sessions writes, is a comment Mostiler allegedly made to another client in which he referred to Osborne by a racial epithet and said he deserved to die.
Time magazine describes Mostiler as “a local lawyer known for his abundant jewelry, handlebar moustache and overwhelming caseload.” He died of a heart attack in 2000.
Mostiler was handling more than 600 cases at the time, four times the limit recommended by the ABA. He failed to request court-appointed investigators to examine Osborne’s mental health and to probe his background for factors mitigating against the death penalty, Sessions writes. There is also doubt about whether he informed Osborne of a plea offer that would have allowed him to escape the death penalty.
Yet the Georgia Supreme Court was not allowed to consider many of the important issues on appeal. One factor was a state law barring appeals courts from considering matters that weren’t raised during trial. Another was a ruling by state courts that Osborne waited too long to raise the issue of his lawyer’s alleged use of the N-word.
Time’s article says no appeals court ever confronted the basic question of whether a defendant facing the death penalty is entitled to a lawyer “who does not hold him in contempt and believe he should be executed.”
Sessions writes that Osborne admits he is guilty of the murders, but his death sentence “has been permanently stained by the acute inadequacy of his counsel, and by the laws that prevent courts from righting the wrongs of his defense.”
Sessions, a partner at Holland & Knight, is a former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas and a member of the Constitution Project’s National Committee on the Right to Counsel.
