Jackson Free Press

Read the complaint and supporting materials

Steve Knox has been on Mississippi's death row for murder since 1999. In a lawsuit filed May 6, Jackson attorney Jim Craig says that the state's legal system has repeatedly failed Knox and 15 other death-row inmates. The problems with Knox's representation began with a woefully underprepared lawyer in his original trial and continued when a state-funded agency failed to thoroughly investigate the original trial for later, post-conviction petitions, Craig alleges.

Charles Press, now a senior attorney with the California Innocence Project, tried to help Knox's trial attorney. Along with Debra Sabah, now his wife, Press provided pro bono assistance on death penalty cases in Mississippi from 1998 to 2001. The two met with Knox's attorney the weekend before his trial and drafted several pre-trial motions for the attorney to use, including motions for DNA evidence and a psychiatric evaluation. The trial attorney, who had not prepared for the trial before meeting Press and Sabah, filed only one of the motions, however.

"That was a startling lack of preparation," Press said. "Even by Mississippi standards, I hadn't seen someone going to trial in a death penalty case who did that little. It was doomed."

Evidence of Knox's ill-prepared trial lawyer may have helped Knox obtain a lighter sentence, but the state-appointed lawyers who represent death-row prisoners after conviction never raised the evidence in their 2003 petition on his behalf. They also did not seek new DNA testing, which, in the case of Knox's federal lawyers, has raised doubts about whether Knox's blood matches that found on the victim. In 2005, the state Supreme Court denied Knox's petition and reaffirmed his death sentence.

Knox is one of 16 death-row prisoners suing Mississippi for failure to adequately staff and fund the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, which represents death-sentenced prisoners after they have exhausted the state appeals process. The lawsuit, filed May 6 in Hinds County Chancery Court, alleges that the Mississippi Supreme Court, which appoints the office's executive director, prevented successive directors from hiring private attorneys to help shoulder a rapidly growing caseload. In the suit, Craig alleges that the state Legislature compounded the office's staffing shortage by repeatedly slashing its budget.

State law requires prisoners sentenced to death to raise any complaints of government misconduct, ineffective representation or jury issues their in post-conviction petitions. Developing a petition for post-conviction relief takes an enormous amount of time, however: attorneys must trawl through trial and appeals records, as well as re-interview witnesses.

The American Bar Association provides a guideline for workload on capital post-conviction cases of 800 to 1200 hours per case. Work on post-conviction cases often extends well beyond the ABA guideline, Press said.
"By the time someone gets a case in post-conviction, it can be seven, eight years after trial," Press said. "If it wasn't tried very well, it's just that much harder to try to find the evidence that you need to present. … You have to present everything as sworn testimony through affidavits. It's a really time-consuming process.

Created in
2000, the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel started with a staff of three attorneys and one investigator. The state Supreme Court began assigning cases to the office almost immediately, handing the office 16 cases in an eight-week span from November 2009 to January 2001. Faced with a daunting workload, then-director C. Jackson Williams tried to hire private attorneys to help prepare petitions in the cases, which were due in 180 days. Chief Justice Edwin Pittman blocked Williams' efforts, though, and in a December 2001 confidential order charged him with "improper" actions for attempting to hire the outside attorneys, Craig says in the lawsuit. Williams resigned Dec. 31, 2001.

"It started off somewhat slow, and then it became very clear that the court was just going to pile every case that they had on them," Press said. "When Jack Williams was head, it just collapsed under the weight of the cases, and he resigned, which I think was actually the ethical thing to do given what his caseload was."

After Williams' departure, the office declined further. Two staff attorneys resigned, leaving new director Bob Ryan as the office's only attorney for several months. At the same time, state support for the office decreased. In 2001, the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel received $987,285 in state appropriations. The next year, its budgets dropped 27 percent, to $719,289. In 2003, the Legislature cut the office's funding by another 10 percent, 
to $647,702.