Adam Liptak, New York Times
In America, when the lawyer screws up, the criminal defendant is often the one who suffers. This frequently results in incredibly unjust decisions. Esteemed U.S. Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times Adam Liptak has taken on this problem in an interesting new article in the Michigan Law Review. Here’s the intro (full essay here):
If you were to ask a child whether it would be fair to execute a prisoner because his lawyer had made a mistake, the answer would be no. You might even get a look suggesting that you had asked a pretty stupid question. But judges treat the issue as a hard one, relying on a theory as casually accepted in criminal justice as it is offensive to principles of moral philosophy.1
This theory holds that the lawyer is the client’s agent.2 What the agent does binds the principal. But clients and lawyers fit the agency model im- perfectly. Agency law is built on the concepts of free choice, consent, and loyalty, and it is not unusual to find lawyer-client relationships in which some or all of these elements are missing.
Let us put to one side the ideal case: a sophisticated client with money. That client presumably chooses a good lawyer, monitors and controls the lawyer’s work, and fires her if she turns out to be disloyal or incompetent. The lawyer in that case really is the instrument of her client’s will, and so the client may fairly be tagged with the lawyer’s errors.3
Now consider a client who is poor, uneducated, mentally troubled, scared, or imprisoned—or perhaps all of these things at once. And then add to this mix a lawyer who is not retained but a volunteer or assigned by the state.4 Does it still make sense to consider such a lawyer an authentic agent of the client?
Wrongful Convictions Blog 
Reblogged this on arkansastruthseeker.
To answer the last question< No they are not agents of their clients ever in that situation. They are exactly what they are called state appointed so therefore are the states agent. The client has no say because the lawyer
lis an agent of the prosecutor. Poor people do not stand a chance from what I have seen in the courts. What would be interesting to me is to find the stats of those that are wrongly convicted because they were poor and had agents for the state convicting them?
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