The prosecutor wants to destroy the condemned based of one act on one day. No one is born a capital murderer. Clearly something happened between the defendant’s birth and that crime…there is always a story to be told, and it’s the defense lawyer’s job to tell it.

McClutchy Newspapers, serialized by Stephen Henderson, did a seven-year, four-state analysis on porous legal defense. The analysis was inspired by the case of a man condemned in Mississippi for killing a woman. The defense lawyer wanted the court to understand that his client’s upbringing had helped make him a killer.

But the lawyer could not convince the judge to give him money to hire investigators to prove that point.

With little money to unearth details about his client’s past, the defense lawyer has no story to tell. The court heard nothing about the client’s low IQ, his childhood in a log cabin without running water or electricity, the savage beatings he took from his alcoholic parents, or the succession of foster families he had to live with. Condemned to death row, this psychotic and delusional prisoner is now fouling his cell with his own feces and urine; his demented screams and shouts keeping other prisoners awake at night.

McClutchy looked into trial transcripts and appeal records and interviewed lawyers for 80 men and women sentenced to death from 1997 through 2004 in four American states. The report found that:

1. In 73 of the 80 cases, defense lawyers gave little or no evidence to decide whether the accused should live or die. The lawyers routinely missed myriad issues of abuse and mental deficiency, abject poverty and serious psychological problems.

2. By failing to investigate their clients’ histories, lawyers in these 73 cases fell far short of the 20-year-old professional standards set by the American Bar Association. Their performances also appear inconsistent with the standards that the Supreme Court has mandated several times.

3. Appeals courts for the most part have ducked those directives about the importance of quality defense counsel. So far, only two of the 80 death sentences have been overturned for bad lawyering.

4. In 11 of the cases, the defendants already had been executed.

Their cases moved through the appeals process without a single judge flagging lapses in the defense attorneys’ performance.

The preceding is the heavy side, life’n’death in lawyering and courts.

But there too is the light side to court scenes:

Prosecutor to Witness: "Are you the deceased?"

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body? WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30.

ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?

WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?

WITNESS: Yes.

ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory? WITNESS: I forget.

ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forget?

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?

WITNESS: No.

ATTORNEY: Blood pressure?

WITNESS: No.

ATTORNEY: For breathing?

WITNESS: No.

ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?

WITNESS: His brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.

ATTORNEY: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?

WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere like yourself.

ATTORNEY: Were you sexually active during the incident? Or did you just lie there?

ATTORNEY: What is your birth date?

WITNESS: July 18th.

ATTORNEY: This year?

WITNESS: Every year.

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?

WITNESS: Yes, when the alarm rings.

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?

WITNESS: Yes.

ATTORNEY: How many were boys?

WITNESS: None.

ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the one who was 20 last month at the time of the accident, how old is he?

WITNESS: Uh, he’s 20 and one month.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception of the baby was August 8th? WITNESS: Yes.

ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?

WITNESS: Uh... too shy to tell you.

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?

WITNESS: By death.

ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?

A lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, and then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month, having smoked all his cigars, the lawyer filed a claim against his insurance company. In his claim the lawyer stated the cigars were lost in "a series of small fires." The insurance company refused to pay. The lawyer sued, and won! The judge stated that the lawyer held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire, and was obligated to pay the claim. Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company paid $15,000 to the lawyer for the loss of his cigars in the "fires."

After the lawyer cashed the check the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of arson!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

And finally, have you heard about the new sushi bar owned by a lawyer? It’s called Sosumi.