How bad does a lawyer’s courtroom performance have to be before a judge will order a retrial? This question was recently answered by a court in New York when Edward Trujillo appealed against a firearms conviction, arguing that his defence lawyer had spent the trial sleeping, reading a magazine and making irrelevant speeches.

In New York, citizens are legally entitled to “meaningful representation” in order not only to protect individual defendants but to ensure that the justice system itself isn’t brought into disrepute by unprofessional conduct.

After he was convicted Trujillo submitted an affidavit swearing that during the trial his counsel fell asleep three times, spent significant periods of the trial when he wasn’t asleep reading health and fitness magazines and made several eccentric speeches which did not seem to be related to the case at all, including an opening speech which caused the jury to laugh at the defence.

In hearing an appeal for a retrial, the original trial judge said he found himself “uncomfortable” whenever Trujillo’s lawyer addressed a witness or the jury as “it was impossible to predict what he was going to say”. Trujillo won his appeal for a retrial. The court held that the quality of representation he got was so insufficient that “the integrity of the judicial process was placed in jeopardy”.

That inappropriate courtroom conduct is, though, trumped by the less than effective representation of attorney Raymond Brownlow who was charged with contempt of court in the District of Columbia in 1968. He had arrived in court in the late morning and had begun to address the judge in a most erratic way in front of a bemused client. This exchange then followed:

JUDGE: Have you been drinking?

BROWNLOW: I had a cocktail at lunch

JUDGE: This morning?

BROWNLOW: Yes

The first thing to draw the suspicion of the judge, however, was the fact that Brownlow was appearing in the wrong case — the opening speech into which he’d loudly launched was for a different trial being held in another courtroom.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. His book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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