Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner Page A

Fielder figured it would only be a matter of time before the rest of it surfaced too. In that respect, though, he’d be wrong. Whatever terrible things Jonathan had done that night were apparently buried too deep for him to dredge up, then or ever. Fielder could understand that; after all, he had the crime-scene photos, in full, glossy color. The sights they depicted were enough to make anyone want to forget.
    Jonathan had done his best, and that would have to do.
    Aside from that, Fielder was actually relieved to have the one week’s adjournment: Under the law, he had only five days following arraignment to submit a written motion attacking the indictment because of Cavanaugh’s failure to provide the defendant a reasonable time to prepare to testify before the grand jury. The extra week meant that much more additional time to work on his papers.
    Not to mention the money.
    The way Fielder figured it, counting driving time, he’d put in eleven hours by the time he got back home. At $175 an hour, that came to almost $2,000! To someone whose bank balance tended to resemble nothing so much as a fuel gauge constantly hovering just over the empty line, the sum was nothing short of unreal. Pay a man pauper’s wages long enough, and he’ll eventually come around to thinking that they’re all he’s worth.
    In fashioning its version of the death penalty, the battle over the allocation of resources for capital defenders had turned out to be one of the stickiest issues the legislature had been required to deal with. To opponents of the death penalty, the worst part of the system is that it pits the vast power and wealth of the state against those who are almost invariably its very poorest members - in terms of economics, education, and intellect. The history of capital-punishment litigation in the modern era can be read as a study of just how far a state shall be permitted to go before the Supreme Court steps in and says that the system has failed to satisfactorily safeguard the process by which it determines which of its accused will live, and which will die. Posed as a question, it comes down to this: What minimum rules must the state promulgate and follow before it may kill?
    One of the cardinal rules is that it must provide the accused with the effective assistance of counsel. And the key word is effective.
    IN 1972, IN THE landmark case of Furman v. Georgia , the Court had swept the slate clean, voiding every single capital statute on the books at the time - those of thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia, as well as that of the federal government itself. In all, some 600 death sentences were vacated.
    Furman didn’t go so far as to rule that the states could not have death penalties. Instead, it found fault with how Georgia, and (in the longest written decision ever handed down by the Court, in which, for the first and only time in history each of the nine justices wrote a separate opinion) how every other jurisdiction with a death penalty had failed to administer it properly and fairly. But in doing so, the Court also showed how a death sentence could be enacted and enforced so as to pass constitutional muster.
    No sooner was the ink on the decision dry, than states began the process of rewriting their laws, attempting as they did so to follow the blueprint laid out in Furman. The first efforts encountered unforeseen problems, renewed challenges, and frequent setbacks. But with each setback, the state legislatures learned something, and each subsequent law had the benefit of those experiences. By the end of the decade, death rows began filling up again, and in 1977, when a man named Gary Gilmore successfully insisted that his lawyers curtail their fight to prolong his life, death regained a foothold in American jurisprudence. By the mid-nineties, executions had become commonplace, and it was no longer unusual to pick up a newspaper and read that two or three prisoners had been put to death the evening