The governor's most recent appointee to the Florida Supreme Court condemned the quality of the private lawyers handling Death Row appeals, saying some have botched inmate cases, muddled and omitted key arguments and generally performed ``the worst lawyering I've seen.''
Justice Raoul Cantero not only indicted the private lawyers when he spoke this week to a panel of lawmakers and judges. He voiced grave concerns about Gov. Jeb Bush's long-standing effort to close the state-run offices handling the appeals so that private attorneys can argue the cases on the cheap.
In 2003, Bush wanted to shutter all three of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel offices. But he persuaded lawmakers to close only the office representing North Florida. Lawmakers plan to examine this spring whether to privatize the remaining offices in Fort Lauderdale and Tampa.
The state lists about 150 lawyers in a registry and pays them $100 an hour, per client, to handle all cases in the north district or overflow in the south and central areas.
To get on the registry, a lawyer needs only limited experience in criminal courts. Cantero says this is a problem because an attorney familiar with a few burglary trials doesn't have the skills to replace someone devoted to the highly specialized Death Row appeals process, which takes years to learn and master.
Cantero said Tuesday it would be ''precipitous'' if the Legislature decided to use only private practice attorneys, some of whom file ``the worst briefs that I have read. . . . I wouldn't say [they're] incomprehensible. But it's difficult to understand what issue the attorney is raising in the case.
''I'm not sure we have enough quality lawyers out there that would be able to pick up the slack,'' Cantero said, while speaking highly of attorneys who were trained or still work in the state-run offices.
Those attorneys are versed in the complex legal filings needed to ensure a fair trial for a convict facing death at the state's hands who had a bad lawyer or an unfair trial.
''Some of the registry counsel have little or no experience in death penalty cases. They have not raised the right issues,'' said Cantero, who didn't give names or cases. ``Sometimes they raise too many issues and still they haven't raised the right ones. In arguments they're unable to respond to questions, or they don't know what the record shows. They don't have a real good understanding of death penalty cases.''
Rep. Joe Negron, a top-ranked Republican from Stuart who helped push Bush's privatization plan through, said Cantero's comments ''carry a lot of weight.'' Negron said he wanted to see caseload, cost and outcome data this year to determine whether to scrap either the privatization plan or the state-run offices.
''I don't like the current hybrid system,'' he said. ``But this is the beginning of the debate, not the end.''
Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj said the governor's office greatly respects the opinions of Cantero -- the state's first Hispanic justice -- but wouldn't comment on what he said. Faraj said the idea of turning over the appeals to private attorneys was an effort to provide efficient counsel while saving tax dollars.
In the northern district, the privatization effort is supposed to save $1.7 million a year.
Faraj said when the effort was first launched that it would save time as well. She said that Death Row cases take up to two decades.
But Cantero said that the privatization effort is delaying the process instead of speeding it up because inexperienced lawyers ``allege 10 issues or more, sometimes 20 issues. They take a shotgun approach. Of those 20 issues, 19 are totally baseless.
''For us to wade through the morass of baseless claims takes a lot of work for the justices and eventually leads to a lot of inefficiencies in the process,'' he said. ``That takes a lot of time that we can be spending on civil cases, on other criminal cases on important issues.''
