USA (Tennessee): Drohende rechtswidrige Hinrichtung

(auf Englisch)

Three people – two men and the mother of one of them – disappeared in Memphis, Tennessee, in late February 1994. A week later, their bodies were found beneath a newly interred coffin in a grave in a Memphis cemetery. Three men were charged with the murders. One of the men – who had led the police to the bodies – was found hanged in his jail cell before trial, his death ruled a suicide. The other two men – the brother of the man who had hanged himself and Tony Carruthers – were brought to a joint trial in April 1996. Both were convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

Before the trial, a series of lawyers were appointed to represent Tony Carruthers. Each was allowed to withdraw in the face of their client’s complaints against them. Eventually, in January 1996, the judge decided that he had forfeited his right to a lawyer and forced Carruthers to represent himself against his wishes and over his protests. After the ruling, Tony Carruthers offered to accept his most recent lawyer continuing to represent him (the lawyer himself was prepared to), to apologize, and to withdraw the accusations he had made against him. The judge refused, deciding that the defendant was merely seeking to further delay the trial. Three days later, during jury selection, the prosecution asked for a delay due to one of its witnesses being ill. The judge granted a three-month delay. Tony Carruthers made another request for a lawyer. The judge refused. In 2000, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the judge was "fully justified in concluding that Carruthers had forfeited his right to counsel…" US law requires federal courts to give a very high level of deference to state court decisions, and under this standard the federal courts have denied Tony Carruthers relief and upheld his death sentence. 

When the US Court of Appeals upheld the state court decisions in 2018 under this high level of deference, the three-judge panel showed its concern, stressing that "nothing in this opinion is intended to bless the state trial court’s actions or the merits of the Tennessee Supreme Court’s opinion affirming those actions". It was "troubling", it said, that the trial judge had "required Carruthers to proceed pro se through his capital murder trial without giving him the warnings typically required in the distinct context of a defendant’s affirmatively waiving his right to counsel." One of the judges raised the issue of "mental illness" being the cause of a defendant’s misconduct and concluded that a criminal defendant must not be denied their right to counsel "as a form of punishment".

International law requires that anyone facing the death penalty is provided "adequate legal assistance at all stages of the proceedings" and that this should go "above and beyond the protections afforded in non-capital cases." The UN Human Rights Committee, the expert body established under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the USA ratified in 1992, has emphasized that under the treaty "all accused of a criminal charge" have the right "in full equality" to defend themselves in person or through "legal counsel of their own choosing". In noting that the right of a defendant to self-representation is "not absolute", the Committee explained in its authoritative interpretation (General Comment 32) on the right to equality before the courts and to a fair trial under the ICCPR, that "the interests of justice may, in the case of a specific trial, require the assignment of a lawyer against the wishes of the accused, particularly in cases of persons substantially and persistently obstructing the proper conduct of trial, or facing a grave charge but being unable to act in their own interests". Contrary to what happened in this case, the right to counsel cannot be forfeited and the defendant forced into self-representation as a sanction for improper conduct.