Fair trial integral to American values

No matter what you think of the death penalty, we can all agree that capital cases are riveting. They're like a seven-car pileup on the highway; we just can't look away.

This past week, Ronnie Lee Gardner became the third person since 1976 to be executed by firing squad in this country. His case generated a worldwide media frenzy, intended to captivate us all.

And so it did. But by Friday, June 18, the morning after the execution, the fact of Gardner's death began receding from our collective consciousness. We are unlikely to consider it again, if ever, until the next execution-related media frenzy.

We pay much less attention to smaller, non-death cases or even to potential death cases that end in acquittals. How many of us even knew, for example, that another (formerly capital) Utah murder defendant, Wade Maughan, was fully acquitted last week?

The press covered every stage of Gardner's impending death. By contrast, they hardly addressed Maughan's acquittal, which was awarded despite a lengthy 2005 videotaped "confession" by the defendant. Missing almost completely was any discussion of the five years Maughan spent incarcerated (at taxpayers' expense) while awaiting trial.

If Maughan's acquittal could generate so little media attention, then what chance do non-capital, non-murder defendants have to garner our attention and concern — no matter their innocence? Especially if they are poor and caught in the morass that is Utah's constitutionally inadequate indigent criminal defense system?

As the Supreme Court recognized in the groundbreaking case Gideon v. Wainwright, there is perhaps no more important right in the Constitution than the right to counsel in criminal cases. Under our Constitution, it is the state's responsibility to ensure that the right to counsel for indigent defendants is carefully safeguarded. Innocent people must not be convicted of crimes they did not commit; defendants must receive the fair trials guaranteed by our Constitution; and the outcome of any trial should never depend on the wealth of the accused.

Yet Utah is one of only two states that provide no state funding for indigent criminal defense. The state also provides no statewide regulation or oversight. Instead, it shunts off to individual counties, some better-funded than others, the full responsibility of satisfying the state's constitutional obligations to indigent defendants.