ABSTRACT
The most important right a criminal defendant has is the right to effective assistance of counsel, as this impacts his or her ability to exercise all subsequent due process rights. This right is most salient for those facing the ultimate punishment—the death penalty. Capital defendants are, without exception, poor and often must rely upon legal representation by court-appointed attorneys. Due to a number of flaws in the court appointment system, these defendants are unlikely to be well represented during the guilt and punishment phases of capital trials and, therefore, are more than two times as likely to be sentenced to death than capital defendants who manage to scrape together the funds to hire private defense attorneys. This results in a system of injustice for the poorest defendants in our criminal justice system, who find themselves serving death sentences as a result of their poverty rather than the depravity of the crime they committed. Likewise, the ultimate injustice, a wrongful death sentence, is more likely to occur when a poor capital defendant is indigent and unable to afford a competent defense attorney. In many cases, the United States capital system punishes defendants not for their crimes, but for their socioeconomic status.
