I use a Web site called Quora, a question and answer site. I sometimes answer questions there. I did that very thing Friday night, and I thought I would post the answer here:
The question was: What happened in a courtroom that made you feel sorry for the defendant?
It happened about 45 years ago, when I was a fairly new reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle during a trial involving the torture and murder of an elderly couple in the little town of Wrens. Two men had already been convicted and sentenced to life sentences for armed robbery plus death for the murders. These two were clearly very bad men (look up Billy Sunday Birt and the Dixie Mafia). I was covering the trial of a third man charged in the murders. He was young and poor, defended by a court-appointed attorney.
The defense attorney looked lost. He didn’t seem to know where he was going, or maybe even where he was. One day I sat next to the county attorney for the county where the trial was being held. He was not involved with the trial, but was interested like almost everyone in the county. At one point he leaned over towards me and said, “It’s a shame the quality of the representation you get depends on how much money you have.” That seemed to validate my feeling that the defense attorney was not doing a very good job.
I wasn’t sure whether the defendant was guilty, even after the trial. I felt sorry for him because it seemed that another more competent attorney might have managed to get a hung jury, if not an acquittal. In his argument during the penalty phase of the trial, the defense attorney begged the jury not to return a death sentence if they had even the slightest doubt about the defendant’s guilt. The jury returned life sentences, which I took as confirmation that the jury did have doubts, and that there might have been a way that another attorney could have found to get an acquittal.
But it was fortunate that I wasn’t on that jury.
I had forgotten a lot about the trial when I thought about answering this question, so I looked up as much as I could find. I didn’t find much about the third defendant in the trial, but I found a lot about the other two defendants, and enough mention of the third defendant that it’s pretty clear to me today that he was involved. He was certainly involved in other criminal activities of the Dixie Mafia.
This murder was unthinkably horrible, and it would have been a horrible mistake for one of the perpetrators to go free. So, my feeling of sympathy for him was misplaced.
Notes: The death penalties imposed on the two other defendants were later overturned, but there was no danger of their going free. Billy Sunday Birt was already in jail for another murder, and both had those life sentences as well. Birt was suspected of more than 50 deaths. It’s almost certainly impossible to know whether he actually committed all or any of those murders at this point. He died in prison in 2017 at age 79. As far as I can tell, Bobby Gene Gaddis, the second man convicted in the murders, died in prison around 2007. I can’t find anything about Charles Reed, the man whose trial I attended, but based on a number of appeals after the trial, he is either dead or still in prison. A fourth man, an attorney, had been charged, but the state dropped the charges and he was never tried.
It’s so interesting reading this and thinking about the horrific murders that took place in Georgia earlier this week. I keep getting the sense from all the headlines and reporting that there is an undercurrent of sympathy for the murderer. He was a sex addict, which was at odds with his fundamentalist religion. I have no sympathy. He murdered eight innocent people. In the context of this post, it makes me wonder how many jurors will sympathize with the defendant. A good attorney can make a lot of bad things go away.
I respect your ability to have held such a job. I don’t think I would have lasted covering a beat like that.
As for Quora, I have sworn off of it. I used to visit it regularly (and I still sometimes do when a Google search returns hits there), but I found it was a huge time suck. I could just scroll through the questions/answers for hours. So I’ve walked away.
Robin — The Atlanta murders were terrible. It’s hard to comprehend what the families must be going through. Someone said he knew the killer was white because he was taken alive. And now we have another mass shooting in Boulder. This country is truly mad.
Paul — Fortunately, I didn’t cover many stories like that murder trial. Most of what I covered was what dirt road was going to be paved by the county commission, and how much the school bond was going to be.
You’re right about Quora. It is a huge time suck. Plus there are a lot of, let’s say, less than useful questions and answers.