Judge Looks Back at Case of Atlanta Courthouse Shooter

A capital defendant may not be entitled to a "Cadillac defense," a Georgia judge said Saturday, but government needs to supply "at least a '72 Jeep defense." Retired judge Hilton Fuller, who presided over the trial of Atlanta courthouse shooter Brian Nichols in 2007 until recusing from the case, spoke before an American Bar Association audience at the ABA's annual meeting in New York City.

The topic of the session was the national crisis in funding for capital defendant representation, and Fuller recounted his experience in the Nichols case as an example of how politics plays into the problem, leading state legislators to cut the budgets that pay for qualify representation for indigent capital defendants at trial. In a 2005 shooting spree at the Fulton County Courthouse, Brian Nichols killed a judge, a court reporter and two law enforcement officers.  When defense costs in the case approached $2 million, the state system for capital defense nearly collapsed, with some political leaders suggesting that Nichols should not get any support for taxpayers because of the heinousness of the crime and because his guilt was not in doubt. Some legislators even mounted a campaign to impeach Fuller after the funding crisis prompted Fuller to suspend the trial.

"I had no idea politics was going to be involved," Fuller said Saturday. "All the political pressure was in favor of the prosecutor." In the climate of the trial, Fuller said, a child murderer would have been more popular than Nichols. Fuller withdrew from the case after the New Yorker published comments Fuller made about it, which Fuller says were off the record. Jury selection for a new trial is now underway.

Fuller said the prosecutor in the case, Paul Howard, shares the blame for the high cost of the trial defense because of the decisions he made to bring a 54-count indictment with 13 different crime scenes and 487 witnesses. Given that kind of indictment, a diligent defense would require researching all those witnesses, Fuller said. "Why have 54 counts?" Fuller asked. "Why make it the most complicated case in history?" An indictment with far fewer counts and witnesses -- and lower cost -- would have sufficed, Fuller said, but he had little authority to tell the prosecutor to scale it down. "There is a relationship between what the prosecutors spends and what the defense needs," Fuller said. "Nobody was asking the hard questions ofthe prosecutor."

Fuller said he now thinks "you can't take the politics out of it. It may be that the system is inherently flawed." But he said judges and bar leaders "cannot sit still" and allow funding for indigent defendants  to evaporate. "It all makes you a little bit sick." But Fuller says he did what he felt justice required in the Nichols case, "and I would do it again."