A recent supreme court ruling has made it mandatory that a client must consent to his attorney’s defense strategy that include concessions of guilt. In McCoy v. Louisiana, the defendant’s attorney, over his client’s objections, conceded that his client had in fact murdered 3 members of his family.
The defense attorney, who faced what the supreme court characterized as a mountain of evidence, focused his efforts on attempting to persuade the jury to convict his client of a lessor offense than murder. This would include the possibility of manslaughter, based on the theory of a “heat of passion” killing. Manslaughter would carry a lower penalty than first degree murder. The defendant, Robert McCoy, objected to his attorney’s strategy at several points before and during the proceeding.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion, stating “With individual liberty — and, in capital cases, life — at stake, it is the defendant’s prerogative, not counsel’s, to decide on the objective of his defense: to admit guilt in the hope of gaining mercy at the sentencing stage, or to maintain his innocence, leaving it to the state to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,”
In 2008 McCoy was convicted in Maryland of murdering his mother-in-law, stepson, and father-in-law. The wife was in protective custody at the time. The evidence included a 911 phone call in which the mother-in-law can be heard yelling at the defendant by name, followed by a gunshot. The phone used to make the phone call was subsequently recovered from the defendant’s abandoned vehicle by police officers.
The defendant will be granted a new trial.
