Case No. 16-8255 | La. Decision
In 2011, Mr. McCoy was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of the son, mother, and step-father of his estranged wife. Before trial, his public defender told him that he was going to concede that Mr. McCoy was guilty of second degree murder by reason of diminished capacity. The public defender told Mr. McCoy that he could not win the case and that conceding Mr. McCoy’s guilt would save his life. Mr. McCoy emphatically rejected this strategy and maintained his complete innocence. His public defender believed it was his ethical duty to concede Mr. McCoy’s guilt for two reasons: 1) because he could not prove that Mr. McCoy was not in Louisiana at the time of the murders and 2) because conceding to second degree murder would eliminate the death penalty at sentencing and thus save Mr. McCoy’s life. At trial, despite Mr. McCoy’s objections, his public defender conceded his guilt and told the jury “I’m telling you, Mr. McCoy committed these crimes.” Mr. McCoy told the judge that he did not want his public defender to represent him and that it was unconstitutional for the judge to allow his public defender to continue defending (or not defending) him.
Mr. McCoy then testified to his own innocence, while in closing arguments his counsel argued that he murdered his family, but that he could not have formed specific intent and thus should be guilty of only second-degree murder. The jury returned a verdict of first degree murder on all three counts and sentenced him to death the next day. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and held, in relevant part, that the trial court did not err when it allowed his counsel to concede his guilt because it was a reasonable strategy, that failure to follow Mr. McCoy’s proposed innocence strategy did not deny him assistance of counsel because counsel did not fail to defend him but just chose a different strategy, and that the concession of guilt did not waive Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights because it was a reasonable strategy, and thus still assistance of counsel. The Louisiana Court relied on Florida v. Nixon, a 2004 Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that lawyers do not need to obtain a clients’ express consent before conceding guilt in a capital case. The Supreme Court will now decide whether a lawyer may concede the guilt of a client over the client’s express objection.
Louisiana argues that it is proper for lawyers to ignore their client’s wishes if the legal strategy is reasonable and that the Court should not apply a blanket rule of client consent that may hamper a lawyer’s strategic choices. Mr. McCoy argues that his public defender essentially switched sides from representing him to “selling him out” as he put it in the courtroom. In an amicus brief from a Louisiana non-profit, the group notes that a capital defendant in Louisiana essentially has “no right to a lawyer who will insist on his innocence” and that in four other capital cases since 2000, counsel were allowed to concede clients’ guilt over express objections.
The Court will have to decide as a matter of ethics whether the client’s instructions rule, as the Court held in the 1975 case of Faretta v. California, or if a reasonable litigation strategy outweighs a client’s express instructions. Because this decision will apply to capital cases, it will be interesting to see how the court balances the argument that a concession of guilt could save a client’s life against the argument that a lawyer works for his or her client.