Word: trialing
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...Death row is full of the poor and the powerless. At the same time, as sociologist Jefferey Reinman has pointed out, government leaders such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon have never even gone to trial for their involvement in military actions abroad which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in southeast Asia...
...more disturbing was the fact that the person alleged to have uttered it was Osborne's own court-appointed lawyer. And somehow, through years of appeals in state and federal courts, no tribunal has squarely confronted this basic but fundamental question: is a person on trial for his life entitled to a lawyer who does not hold him in contempt and believe he should be executed...
...hours, including an extensive investigation of the accused's childhood, mental health, drug abuse history and so on. But the law does not promise a first-rate defense. As a panel of judges from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said in denying Osborne's request for a new trial, "for a petitioner to show deficient performance" by an attorney, "he must establish that no competent counsel would have taken the action that his counsel did take." And how do you show that? "There are no absolute rules," the judges said vaguely...
...Osborne's has been a fairly typical capital appeal, in which the defense team heaps allegations on the original lawyer - the high-living Mostiler died of a coronary in 2000 - while the prosecution extols the brilliance of the condemned man's trial attorney. "Mostiler was the toughest trial lawyer in Spalding County," one prosecutor declared of a man far better known for engineering guilty pleas than for winning cases in the courtroom...
...Those words didn't actually surface until years after they were allegedly uttered, when another Mostiler client at the time of Osborne's trial reported the slur. He said Mostiler indicated that he wasn't planning to work very hard to save the killer and that he wasn't telling Osborne that the state was offering a plea bargain to life in prison. The issue of the plea deal had already been raised in an earlier appeal before the lawyer's death, and when Mostiler testified that he conveyed the state's offer and Osborne turned it down, the appellate...