By Nathan Koppel
Wall Street Journal
August 5, 2011
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/08/05/would-jeffs-have-fared-better-with-a-lawyer-at-his-side/
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| Warren Jeffs said during trial that he wanted to defend himself because his lawyers couldn’t understand his proposed defense. |
The trial of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Texas polygamous sect who was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls, will likely go down in history as an another examples of the peril of representing yourself in court.
A jury yesterday convicted Jeffs of two counts of sexual assault. Here’s a WSJ report, which notes that the prosecution wrapped up its case by playing an audio tape of Jeffs’s sexual encounter with a 12-year-old girl; he is heard on tape calling it a “heavenly session.”
As we noted earlier, Jeffs fired his lawyers on day one of the trial. His behavior at trial was odd, to put it mildly; he would sit mutely for hours but then, on occasion, sermonize about religious freedoms and the history of polygamy. Yesterday, he stood silently for most of his 30-minute closing argument before uttering “I’m at peace.”
Houston criminal defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin told WSJ that an attorney could have mounted a potent defense, particularly challenging how the evidence against Jeffs was gathered. “He had some very strong factual and legal defenses,” DeGuerin said.
Does the Jeffs case suggest there should be limits placed on a person’s right to represent himself in court?
This article in the Standard Times in San Angelo, Texas, where the Jeffs trial was held, offers a nice analysis of self-representation, a right provided by both the U.S. and Texas and U.S. Constitutions. In 1975, in Faretta v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to self-representation in state criminal trials.
Despite the seeming risks involved, statistics suggest that the conviction rates of self-represented felony defendants who end up at trial are not that different from those who retain legal counsel, according to the Standard Times, which describes a 2007 study by the University of Georgia School of Law.
The study surveyed felony court cases from 1998 to 2003, concluding that pro se felony defendants in state courts are convicted at rates equivalent to or lower than the conviction rates of represented felony defendants.
Still, one has to believe that in a high-stakes, emotionally-charged prosecutions like the one Jeffs faced, the advice of counsel is useful.
The question now is what sort of sentence Jeffs might be facing. The jury could send him to prison for the rest of his life.
According to this AP account, prosecutors have brought criminal charges, including sexual assault and bigamy, against 11 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religious group led by Jeffs.
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