美国国家公共电台 NPR Do You Have The Right To Plead Not Guilty When Your Lawyer Disagrees?

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

OK. Today the U.S. Supreme¹ Court is hearing arguments in a case that involves a pretty surprising plot twist. The lawyer for the defendant² in a brutal³ triple-murder case told the jurors that the accused, his client, was guilty. The defense⁵ attorney said he did this in an effort to avoid the death penalty despite his client's insistence⁶ he was innocent. And the question before the justices today is whether that lawyer violated his client's constitutional right to counsel. Here's NPR's Nina Totenberg.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE⁷: In 2008, Robert McCoy's wife, Yolanda, took her infant daughter and fled Louisiana. She went into protective custody⁸ in Dallas after her husband held her at knifepoint and threatened to kill her. She left her son with her parents, so he could finish high school and graduate. A month later, McCoy was arrested and charged with killing⁹ his wife's parents and her son. A 911 tape recorded Yolanda's mother screaming, she ain't here, Robert. I don't know where she is. The detectives have her. A gunshot is heard and then the line goes dead. From that day to this, although the evidence against him was overwhelming, McCoy has proclaimed his innocence¹⁰, alleging¹¹ that the killings¹² were the product of a drug deal gone bad and that police conspired¹³ to frame him because he supposedly revealed their involvement in drug trafficking.

Five months after McCoy's arrest, state psychiatric experts found him mentally competent to stand trial. But he was continually at odds¹⁴ with his public defenders¹⁵, eventually firing them for refusing to file subpoenas¹⁶ he prepared for a dozen witnesses he said could support his alibi¹⁷ defense and other claims. He briefly¹⁸ acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him. And even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense. Lawyer English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison or to plead not guilty by reason of insanity¹⁹. But McCoy refused, insisting that he was innocent.

Finally, English embarked²⁰ on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt⁴ in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Directly contradicting his client's instructions, he suggested that McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity and should, therefore, only be convicted of second degree murder. But as the prosecutor²¹ would soon explain to the jury, that defense was legally unavailable to McCoy because Louisiana only allows a diminished capacity argument if the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It was one of many mistakes English appears to have made during the trial. Throughout, McCoy kept interrupting his lawyer's concessions²² of guilt, even trying to fire him. The jury ultimately sentenced McCoy to death. And the question today is whether he was denied his constitutional right to counsel.

On one side is McCoy's new lawyer who will tell the Supreme Court that when a criminal defendant refuses to plead guilty, the lawyer is not free to disregard that decision. On the other side, the state of Louisiana argues that when a lawyer and his client have irreconcilable²³ differences, the client has a choice represent himself or cede²⁴ the strategy for the trial to his lawyer. Because McCoy did not try to fire his lawyer until just days before the trial, the state contends he had to let the lawyer dictate²⁵ legal strategy. Ten leading legal ethics²⁶ experts have filed a brief in the case siding with McCoy. Lawrence Fox, a Yale Law School ethics lecturer, says these cases occur more often than you might expect, especially in capital cases where defendants²⁷ are only rarely found incompetent²⁸ to stand trial.

LAWRENCE FOX: This is a very difficult issue, obviously. Most of us would think that the lawyers should just do what's in the best interest of the client in the view of the lawyer.

TOTENBERG: But the Constitution and the legal profession have drawn²⁹ the line differently, he says.

FOX: The client should get to decide because the client is the person who's going to suffer whatever the result is. And we can imagine many situations where a lawyer might be overbearing.

TOTENBERG: So overbearing that the lawyer's will can sometimes trump³⁰ his client's ability to be master of his own fate. A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

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