‘I failed’: Atlanta lawyer quits state job after judges reject subpar work

A metro Atlanta attorney, saying she is embarrassed by her own “substandard” work, has resigned from the Georgia Public Defender Council after the state’s top judges rejected her appeal arguments in multiple criminal cases.

Stone Mountain resident Marilyn Tyler said in a letter to the Georgia Supreme Court that she struggled with her weighty caseload at the council but takes full responsibility and understands “the seriousness of my errors.” She said she resigned from the state agency and is sorry for the impact on its work and the cases she was assigned, adding she is “embarrassed and contrite.”

The council’s lawyers provide legal services to criminal defendants who can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

Appeals in at least 10 criminal cases, including several murder cases, have been delayed because of deficiencies in Tyler’s filings, court records show. The cases have been remanded to trial courts for different criminal defense attorneys to take over her duties.

“My substandard performance is inexcusable and beneath the dignity of a competent appellate attorney,” Tyler said in the July 13 letter, filed in several cases.

She added: “I also acknowledge that I failed in my duty to adequately alert my superiors of my inability to sufficiently manage my caseload. Additionally, I failed in my responsibility to thoroughly review my brief for accuracy and necessary edits before filing, instead rushing to file ahead of the deadline but submitting a document to the Court that is substandard.”

Attempts to contact Tyler were not successful Tuesday. She was admitted to the State Bar of Georgia in 2019, its records show.

Her letter responded to multiple court orders for her to show why she shouldn’t be kicked off cases and further sanctioned. In one such order, filed July 1, the state’s justices said they had previously admonished Tyler because her work “results in a disservice to her client and falls well below the standard that this Court expects from the counsel who practice before it.”

The affected defendants include those convicted in relation to fatal shootings at an Atlanta apartment complex and a home in Griffin, the death of a Roswell woman, and the torture and murder of a former police witness whose body was discovered stuffed in the trunk of a car parked at a MARTA station.

Problems with Tyler’s briefs included the failure to identify which convictions were being challenged and short, undeveloped arguments that lacked supporting authority, the state Supreme Court said.

In her letter, Tyler expressed her “sincere and heartfelt apologies for deficiencies in my performance that violate the rules of this Court.”

The latest of her cases to be remanded for new counsel involves sexual battery and child molestation charges. In that case, the Georgia Court of Appeals said in a Sept. 4 order that Tyler’s defense brief “also appears to be substantially deficient and well below the expectations this Court has for the attorneys practicing before it.”

The nine-page brief at issue, filed in April, outlines the facts of the case within two sentences and includes several lines of garbled text commonly referred to as keyboard smash. The more detailed opposing brief filed by prosecutors in the case is 29 pages long.

The Court of Appeals was asked in August to remand the case because the state Supreme Court had found Tyler’s appellate work in other cases lacking. The request came from Cynthia Wright Harrison, as the managing appellate attorney for the Georgia Public Defender Council.

“The Georgia Supreme Court has determined that all the briefs submitted by Ms. Tyler were substantially deficient and as a result of the deficiencies remanded each of her cases to the appropriate superior court, instructing the court to appoint new appellate counsel,” Harrison wrote in the remand request.

The council did not make a representative available for an interview or respond to several of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s questions about Tyler. In a written statement last week, a spokesperson told the AJC the council provided new representation to the affected criminal defendants when notified of problems with Tyler’s filings.

The spokesperson said the council accepts responsibility for addressing the issue and is reviewing its procedures to help prevent similar problems in the future. They said the council’s appellate team had been short-staffed and that Tyler took cases from another attorney who left the council midway through appeals.