To Try to Save Client’s Life, a Lawyer Ignored His Wishes. Can He Do That? - The New York Times

"The question before the court [SCOTUS], which will decide if Mr. [Robert] McCoy should get a new trial, is whether it is unconstitutional for a lawyer [Larry English] to concede a client’s guilt against the client’s wishes....

Mr. English said it was Mr. McCoy’s delusions of a grand conspiracy that made his client unable to participate in his defense and that led him to believe he had no choice but to try to save his client’s life [by pleading guilty and aiming for a sentence of life in prison].

Two weeks before the trial, Mr. English told Mr. McCoy that he was going to admit that Mr. McCoy was guilty because maintaining credibility with the jury was the best chance to keep him alive.

Mr. McCoy furiously objected and tried to have Mr. English removed from the case. Mr. McCoy’s parents wrote to the judge also seeking Mr. English’s removal....

It is not unusual for lawyers to admit their client’s guilt, especially in death penalty cases. Usually, the strategy is carried out with the cooperation of the accused. To go against a client’s wishes, however, violates the role lawyers are supposed to play in the legal system, said Lawrence J. Fox, a lecturer at Yale Law School.

“This is one of the most difficult questions that we’ve identified in being a lawyer,” said Mr. Fox, who filed a brief with several colleagues from the Ethics Bureau at Yale on Mr. McCoy’s behalf. “You start with the fundamental proposition that we are our client’s servants.”

As long as the client is not asking the lawyer to do anything illegal, and unless the client has been declared incompetent, the lawyer has to take instruction from the client regarding the admission of guilt, he added.

“It means some clients on death row may be committing suicide, but that’s their choice to make,” Mr. Fox said.

The Louisiana Supreme Court has allowed lawyers to concede their client’s guilt over their client’s objections at least four times since 2000...."