Murder, media and other capital mayhem

I have been meaning all week to spotlight Jeffrey Toobin’s fascinating essay in The New Yorker about all the craziness surrounding the crimes and trials and tribulations of Brian Nichols, the notorious Georgia courthouse shooter.  Here was one of many great passages from the Toobin piece:

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 senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta, “We are just now starting to see the ripple effect of Nichols. The question now is whether the whole thing is going to come crashing down.”

The quote from Stephen Bright is now especially interesting in light of this new development regarding the Nichols case:

The judge presiding over the case of accused courthouse shooter Brian Nichols says he is stepping down from the case.  Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller announced his decision in a letter to Doris Downs, the chief judge for Fulton County Superior Court. 

He cited recent media reports referring to a quote in a magazine article attributed to him in which he allegedly asserted that Brian Nichols was guilty. 

The article by Jeffrey Toobin appeared in the New Yorker.  Fuller insisted he didn’t recall making the comment and that his arrangement with the writer was that their conversation would be for background only.