The conversation about pro se defendants
Sunday, March 30th, 2008This issue is very interesting and complex. The Volokh Conspiracy has a post about the use of empirical data in oral argument. But down in the thread, there’s an insightful comment about the actual problems that pro se defendants face:
I once prosecuted a murder case against a pro se defendant. His first, counseled, conviction was reversed because the judge wouldn’t let him represent himself and I handled the retrial.
The result of the trial I prosecuted him in was the same — guilty. I did not think he did a bad job, given the situation, although a lawyer would have done better for him obviously. There were numerous eyewitnesses along with a confession he made, and testimony from his first trial, about his having shot several people, so it was hardly a whodunit. . . .
The biggest mistakes he made were not technical legal ones; they were mistakes in knowing what was important in the trial. The shooting arose out of some personal spat with his ex and her new boyfriend. He kept wanting to explore details of the relationships; in his mind, he was showing he was “right” or more moral in various relationship disputes, but to the jurors he was either wasting their time on irrelevant matters, or worse, proving that these disputes added up to enough reason for him to want to kill someone. That misdirected focus is why even an educated person, including a lawyer, should usually not represent themselves in a trial.