After [Brian] Dorsey confessed to killing his cousins Sarah and Ben Bonnie with a shotgun in 2006, Missouri paid two lawyers $12,000 each to defend him. If they had worked 3,557 hours — the average time spent by defense lawyers in death penalty cases, according to a 2010 report commissioned by the federal courts — they would have each earned $3.37 per hour.
Dorsey is scheduled to be put to death on April 9, and a growing number of scholars, lawyers and activists are asking federal courts, along with Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, to stop the execution. They argue that regardless of how much these lawyers worked, the way they were paid created a perverse incentive: Work less to earn more per hour.
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The lawyers who received $12,000 each, Scott McBride and Chris Slusher, declined to comment for this article. During a 2011 hearing over Dorsey’s appeal, they acknowledged they could have asked for more money for a fuller investigation but said that dwelling on his possible psychosis and other mitigating factors might have undercut their overall strategy: Accept blame, express remorse and seek mercy.
That strategy, they added at the hearing, was why they encouraged him to plead guilty in the first place. But this also happened to save them hundreds of hours of work. Dorsey’s current lawyer Megan Crane points out that they failed to use a tactic required by ethical standards: demand that prosecutors drop the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea.
That headline sounds really weird until you read more. Basically his lawyers were paid one lump sum by the state, incentivizing spending as little time as possible on the case.
