A Death Sentence

Two  weeks ago I stood next to a man who was sentenced to death.
Never did that before. Never want to do that again.

The circumstances of how that occurred are somewhat unique.
During the past two weeks friends in the courthouse who saw the picture of me next to the defendant and story in the Herald have been coming up to me offering words of condolences.

Nobody really understands the circumstances of how I found myself in court next to a defendant I had met only a few days before, acting as co-counsel as the court sentenced him to death 
The defendant was represented through trial, where he was found guilty, and through the penalty phase where the jury recommended death, by the Dade County Public Defender’s Office. After the penalty phase was concluded, a conflict developed and the Public Defenders had to withdraw. And when I use the term conflict, I am using it in the legal sense, not that the defendant was angry at his lawyers. He was not.

So the court appointed my trial partner Kellie Peterson and myself to essentially stand next to the defendant while the court handed down the sentence.If you know Kellie and if you know me, you know we were not going to just stand idly by. We filed what motions we could to stop the process, primarily relying on the fact that the United States Supreme Court is going to decide next October if Florida’s death penalty sentencing scheme, which allows for a non-unanimous jury to make a recommendation of death, is constitutional ( it is not constitutional-  a subject for another blog post, and  if Justice Scalia happens to read this, I will get that one up soon. Promise.)

So there Kellie and I stood as the trial judge went through the litany of very difficult facts of the murder in this case.  But I wasn’t standing right next to the defendant. Edith Georgi, who was the defendant’s lawyer through the trial and for the last several years stood next to her former client. She couldn’t technically represent him anymore, but she was there.

Read More about A Death Sentence by Phil Reizenstein on MiamiCriminalDefense.Blogspot.com.