A parody of justice Series: COLUMNS
[STATE Edition]
St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.
Author: MARTIN DYCKMAN
Date: Aug 31, 1997
Start Page: 3.D
Section: PERSPECTIVE
Document Types: COLUMN
Text Word Count: 1060
Copyright Times Publishing Co. Aug 31, 1997
Michael Lambrix has written hundreds of letters from the 9-by-6-foot cell he has inhabited for 15 years on Florida's death row. Printed painstakingly in small, precise letters, page after page, they assert his innocence, argue that he did not have a fair trial and berate the courts bitterly for relying on pompous legal technicalities to deny him a new one.
I have not met Lambrix, but the writing reflects a keen mind. Whether it is also a cunning one is impossible to know. As I have written before, however, it's not the sort of case that should leave anyone comfortable with his execution. His guilt is not exactly ironclad. His sentencing process wasn't fair. Procedurally, the case has been a parody of justice.
Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Lambrix a new sentencing hearing on the same grounds - vague jury instructions - for which it had given one to another Florida death row inmate. New rules, said the court's gibberish, don't apply retroactively.
But that's not the only way in which Lambrix's has been a case apart. Lambrix and his girlfriend had been drinking heavily with a couple they had just met. The couple's bodies were eventually found where Lambrix had buried them. The state persuaded a jury that he had killed them to steal their car. Lambrix's version: It was the other man who killed the woman. He killed the man while trying to save her. He panicked and fled because he was already on the lam from a work-release center where he was serving a bad-check sentence.
"I am guilty of gross stupidity and bad judgment in what took place that night. However, I am not guilty of murder," he says.
It could be a lie, of course, but the state had no evidence that would disprove it. Lambrix's girlfriend, who testified against him, didn't see the killings.
True or false, he had a constitutional right to tell his own story from the witness stand if he wished. The record is clear that he wasn't allowed to.
As his first trial began at Moore Haven in December 1983, one of his two public defenders, Robert Jacobs II, told Circuit Judge James R. Adams that Lambrix had changed the story he had been telling them and that they could not "ethically allow him to take the stand and say something that is not what he told us actually occurred."
"Well, now he's got a right to take the stand if he wants to," Adams reminded them. "You can't keep him off of it."
Conceding that, Jacobs said the defenders "would be forced to withdraw," as legal ethics require in such situations. The judge said the trial would go on without them. "You are not going to stall this thing anymore," he admonished Lambrix.
Lambrix did not testify. His attorneys won him a hung jury.
A new judge would conduct his second trial, but Lambrix did not again ask to testify. By failing to do that, says the state, he waived his right. Ever since, the courts have agreed.
This is technicality triumphant over common sense. Someone like Lambrix, a poorly educated alcoholic raised in an abusive home, could hardly know that each trial begins with a clean record, that Adams' warning no longer applied, that defenses not raised are lost forever.
This aspect of the case contrasts glaringly with what happened when Ellis Rubin, the high-profile Miami lawyer, was defending a coke-dealing ex-con named Rusty Sanborn, accused of murdering an 18-year-old socialite during a bizarre scheme to rob her parents.
Sanborn wanted to take the stand to tell what Rubin knew to be a pack of lies. In his book, Get Me Ellis Rubin, the lawyer wrote that he tried to quit the case but Judge Sidney Shapiro wouldn't let him. Shapiro suspected Sanborn was simply trying to delay the trial. So Shapiro proposed a compromise: Sanborn would testify, Rubin would not question him or cite any false testimony in his summation to the jury. Believing that to be unethical too, Rubin refused. Shapiro, who had to delay the trial for a new lawyer, sent Rubin to jail for 30 days. He lost his appeals and had to serve them.
Sanborn, meanwhile, got a new lawyer, a delay in his trial and the opportunity to spin his tale for a jury, which convicted him of murder and every other crime in sight. But the jury also voted 9-3 to spare his life, which was another break that Lambrix didn't get. Lambrix's jury was told little if anything of his woeful background.
In a federal habeas corpus appeal many years later, Roy Black, the top-notch criminal lawyer who successfully defended the William Kennedy Smith rape case, testified as an expert witness that Lambrix's defense had been ineffective. Alan Sundberg, a former Florida Supreme Court justice, gave a similar opinion as to the quality of Lambrix's initial appeal.
"I was certainly not very complimentary to the appellate services," Sundberg recalled Friday.
Robert Josefsberg, a former general counsel to Gov. Bob Graham, was representing Lambrix at that point. But Lambrix lost that appeal, too. The Florida Supreme Court ruled against him for a seventh time this month. His could be the next death warrant that Gov. Lawton Chiles signs. If so, it will find Lambrix without a lawyer. Josefsberg will say of that only that Lambrix "is very demanding and does not want us to remain as his counsel."
Lambrix wrote another letter last week, addressed to Chiles. It asks for his own death warrant.
"The only way I'm going to have substitute legal counsel timely assigned to my capital case, and to then have what legal claims that may remain to be pled and disposed of in the typical cursory fashion, is to have a death warrant signed and execution date set," Lambrix wrote.
"And as you do so," he added, "I ask you to reflect on this one thought - what murder could be more methodically premeditated than the execution of a man condemned for a crime that never took place? . . . Each of those who have contributed to effecting this act of murder will themselves ultimately stand accountable. And so when you sign my death warrant, I ask that you reflect upon this, and then ask yourself - which of us go the worst fate, you or I?"
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Abstract (Document Summary)
Michael Lambrix has written hundreds of letters from the 9-by-6-foot cell he has inhabited for 15 years on Florida's death row. Printed painstakingly in small, precise letters, page after page, they assert his innocence, argue that he did not have a fair trial and berate the courts bitterly for relying on pompous legal technicalities to deny him a new one.
I have not met Lambrix, but the writing reflects a keen mind. Whether it is also a cunning one is impossible to know. As I have written before, however, it's not the sort of case that should leave anyone comfortable with his execution. His guilt is not exactly ironclad. His sentencing process wasn't fair. Procedurally, the case has been a parody of justice.
But that's not the only way in which Lambrix's has been a case apart. Lambrix and his girlfriend had been drinking heavily with a couple they had just met. The couple's bodies were eventually found where Lambrix had buried them. The state persuaded a jury that he had killed them to steal their car. Lambrix's version: It was the other man who killed the woman. He killed the man while trying to save her. He panicked and fled because he was already on the lam from a work-release center where he was serving a bad-check sentence.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
