Scott Lemieux comments on the Supreme Court’s decision this week in the Maples case about the right to legal counsel:

Surely the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment entails more than being nominally represented by someone who has passed a bar exam somewhere. But Scalia’s defense of the “right” of the state of Alabama to put people to death (even if they’ve never been represented by counsel competent enough or with the necessary resources to properly try a death penalty case) brings up another disturbing precedent set in the 1991 case, Coleman v. Thompson. According to the decision, if Maples’s lawyers missed a deadline because of gross negligence rather than outright abandonment, Maples would have had no legal recourse. The Coleman decision was, as Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in dissent, an example of the Court creating a “Byzantine morass of arbitrary, unnecessary, and unjustifiable impediments to the vindication of federal rights.” In essence, Maples won the right to appeal because the Court recognized that he was at least entitled to legal representation. But had his lawyers just shown up, and done very little else, he would’ve been out of luck. Since the Court’s opinion leaves the Coleman decision undisturbed, it’s unlikely that the Maples case will have much impact going forward.

I highly recommend reading Lemieux’s entire piece over at The American Prospect; it’s not particularly long, but its analysis packs a punch.

After you do, I invite you back here to read my piece on the execution of my friend Ronnie Frye, whose court-appointed attorney was drunk throughout the time that Frye’s was on trial for his life. Having a terrible attorney pretty much amounts to a death sentence and the vast majority of capital defendants can’t afford a lawyer. That we only have the right to an attorney — not a good one, or a sober one, or one who stays awake in court — is a disgrace.