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Published: February 4, 2008, 7:37 am

Oh, hey, so remember Brian Nichols? Jeffrey Toobin's reporting for the New Yorker on his case as raising a lot of interesting issues wrt indigent defense. Here's a paragraph that sort of encapsulates the whole article: The Nichols case illustrates a troubling paradox in death-penalty jurisprudence: the more heinous a crime and the more incontrovertible the evidence of a defendant's guilt the greater the cost of the defense may be. Death-penalty trials require juries not only to determine whether the defendant is guilty but also to make other complex moral judgments why a defendant committed a crime, whether he is likely to do so again, what punishment fits the crime. Defendants are entitled to often costly expert assistance, including the services of psychiatrists, as they prepare their cases. Yet spending large sums of public money on the defense of capital cases is politically incendiary, and in Georgia the consequences may be cataclysmic. According to Stephen B. Bright, the

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