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The prejudices of prosectors and jurors are not the only racial factors which threaten the impartiality of capital trials. Almost all people accused of death-eligible crimes are impoverished and must rely on court-appointed lawyers to defend them at trial. Given the appallingly low standards of many court-appointed attorneys in numerous jurisdictions, there is an ever-present risk that minority defendants may be represented by lawyers who are not only incompetent, but also openly bigoted.
Wilburn Dobbs is one of at least five cases in Georgia where defence attorneys referred to their own clients during the trial by racial slurs, including "nigger". In California, Melvin Wade was sentenced to death after being represented by an attorney who used defamatory language against blacks (including Wade), who failed to adequately present evidence of the childhood abuse suffered by Wade, and who asked that his own client be sentenced to death during the penalty phase of the trial.
Examples of prejudiced representation abound from across the USA. For example, Ramon Mata, a Hispanic man was convicted and sentenced to death in Texas in 1986 by an all-white jury after his attorney agreed with the prosecutor to the removal of all potential non-white jurors. Although the trial judge was aware of this highly irregular arrangement, the appellate courts ruled that Mata's right to a fair trial was not affected by it: he remains on death row. Gary Burris, black, executed in Indiana on 20 November 1997, was described to the jury by his white attorney as an "insignificant, snivelly little street person" during closing arguments.
Thomas Nevius, black, was convicted and sentenced to death in Nevada for the murder of a white victim in 1982. He was tried before an all-white jury after any potential black jurors had been removed during the jury selection process. After the trial, Nevius' defence attorney stated in a sworn affidavit that at the time of the trial the prosecutor told him "you don't think I wanted all those niggers on my jury, did you?" The prosecutor claimed in his sworn response that his memory of the conversation had faded and that if he did use derogatory language, it was in response to the defence attorney's comment that he had "done a good job of getting rid of all the niggers."
The appellate courts have refused even to address these serious allegations, on the grounds that they were raised too late in the legal proceedings. The late claim may well have been due to the fact that Nevius was represented by the same inexperienced lawyers (including the one who purportedly started the conversation with the prosecutor) for the first 10 years that he was on death row.
Even when the attorney is not an overt racist, a lack of cultural sensitivity to other ethnic groups may affect their ability to prepare adequately for the case. White attorneys who are unable to relate to the black community may be unable to properly defend their black clients. This is particularly true during the penalty phase of the trial, which will involve gathering mitigating evidence within that community and preparing black character witnesses to testify in a predominately white court room.
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