University News Last updated 08 April 2011
Law students at are working with to give death row defence lawyers in the access to vital legal information which could save defendants’ lives.
Four LLB and LLM students, under the leadership of Professor of American Public Law Julian Killingley, are helping to develop a computer expert system which will help defence lawyers to identify whether their clients are eligible to appeal against their sentences.
The system, which will be available to defence lawyers free of charge, will initially be tailored to the legal system of , which has a particularly large death row population. There are also plans to adapt the system for other states where the death penalty still exists.
The part of criminal law relating to the death penalty is among the most complex in law. Federal law allows only 180 days in which to appeal against a finalised state death sentence, but this can be complicated by a number of legal issues. Establishing whether a client is eligible for appeal can require a great deal of research and knowledge of case law. The problem is made worse by the lack of funding available for defence lawyers in some states, which sees many of them having to survive on low hourly rates.
An exception is , which provides adequately for defence lawyers, enabling them to successfully appeal against death sentences. The state has also developed a series of around 600 ‘boilerplate’ motions relating to death penalty law, which can be easily adapted to lawyers’ requirements across the state.
Lawyers around the UK, co-ordinated by the charity Amicus, are involved in a project to adapt the Californian motions to Arizonan law. Adapting each motion takes an average of five hours.
These motions will be made available to defence lawyers from a database at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard. The research at Birmingham City University will lay the basis for the new computer system. It will encode the law and capture the expertise of acknowledged experts. The system will ask the user a series of questions about their client’s situation and will return a reasoned indication of their eligibility to appeal.
If the development goes according to plan, it is likely to be the first such expert system to be available in the .
“It’s an exciting project which could provide considerable assistance to death row defence lawyers, and I’m confident that it is an achievable goal,” said Prof Killingley.