Hector De Peña was the first lawyer assigned to defend Carlos ...

944 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
for the state and against the defendant. Because he ain’t going to be
asked back if he does it another way.”
“Number two,” Kelly continued, as a visiting judge “you don’t
really care, do you? Because you’re not going to be here when this is
over.”
Because De Peña and Lawrence weren’t ready to go to trial
when Moore got his first two-week assignment on the case, the local
judges extended his assignment twice—and his fee.
* * * * *
On June 9, with the trial set to begin eleven days later,
Lawrence finally obtained permission from the court to spend the
maximum $500 on an investigator. The next day, Lawrence asked
Judge Moore to postpone the start of the trial because he hadn’t had
time to investigate or prepare. In an unusual move, his type-written
motion asked the judge to kick De Peña off the case for not doing
enough work and to assign a new lawyer to replace De Peña.
Somewhere along the way, the sentence asking for De Peña to
be replaced was crossed out in ink, and the judge never ruled on it.
But Lawrence’s statements criticizing De Peña’s lack of diligence
remained in the document as a reason for a postponement. That’s
what caused the judge to ask De Peña why he’d dropped out of the
case between March and June.
Lawrence then explained his own failure to get going on the
case—and why he hadn’t yet talked to De Peña to find out what his
co-counsel knew. Still displaying an unusual amount of public candor
about a fellow lawyer, Lawrence excused his failure to talk to his cocounsel
by saying that he was pretty sure that De Peña, after months
on the case, knew “even less” about it than Lawrence did after only a
few weeks.
The judge refused to postpone the trial.
A week later, DeLuna tried to take matters into his own
hands, scribbling a statement entitled “Ineffective Counsel” and
sending it to the judge. The words Carlos strung together were
gibberish: “Conflict and the relationship of client and attorney can not
be reached, therefore, the Defendant cannot go safely to trial and
have this said attorney [De Peña] prepare his defense.” But the gist,
and DeLuna’s desperation, were clear enough. He couldn’t safely rest
his life in De Peña’s hands. Or, as he wrote in another letter to the
court, “Mr. De Pena Jr. was not doing nothing [sic] to help me so I
filed a motion to have Mr. De Pena remove [sic]. . . .”