ATLANTA — In a recent opinion in the Georgia Supreme Court, the state’s new Chief Justice wrote that the state’s legal system for post-conviction litigation is “a mess.”
The written comes from Justice Nels Peterson, in a concurring opinion issued in a case where a Toombs County man convicted of murder was working to appeal his conviction.
While the conviction was not overturned, Peterson’s concurring opinion focused on issues in the state legal system, echoing similar comments he made during his State of the Judiciary address to lawmakers in February.
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In the opinion, Peterson lays the blame for issues in the court system at the feet of the Georgia Supreme Court and decisions made over many years.
"It’s a mess in large part because of a series of well-meaning but shortsighted decisions this Court made over the course of several decades," Peterson wrote. “Those decisions had a worthy goal: seeking to ensure that indigent defendants were entitled to appointed counsel for litigating claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. But the means we used to pursue that goal have made things worse, not better.”
Indigent defendants are those without the financial means to retain their own legal counsel, typically those in extreme levels of poverty who are assigned public defenders.
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Peterson’s opinion said the issue harkens back to the 1980s, when Georgia Justices cited no legal authority to require that ineffectiveness claims be raised for a request for a new trial but instead created a rule that the claims but be filed before appeal, if there’s an opportunity to do so.
Citing the history of the court’s decisions in the intervening decades, Peterson said the subsequent legal interpretations had led to “serious problems for the criminal justice system in Georgia.”
Peterson wrote that the current state of affairs in the appeals process had “backed into a system that prioritizes ineffectiveness claims (which have a low success rate) in exchange for imposing serious costs.”
The state’s chief justice added that “given the shortcomings of our system, it is unsurprising to learn that we have made ourselves an outlier. The federal government and most states leave ineffectiveness claims for resolution on habeas [corpus].”
He said the current state of the system makes it so nearly all criminal direct appeals are delayed, making it so when a judgment is reversed or vacated, getting a new trial is harder, if not impossible.
In rare cases where a conviction is reversed and the law prevents a retrial, Peterson said the defendant has instead wasted years of their life in prison and that as a court, “we also do all of this in the most inefficient way possible.”
To make the system work the way it is intended, Peterson said an act of the Georgia General Assembly was needed to make corrections, closing his opinion by again laying the fault upon the state’s Justices.
“In short, the system is broken. We did a lot of the breaking. But it will require legislative action to fix it,” Peterson wrote.
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