The Georgia Supreme Court warned on Monday that Gwinnett County is running out of time to try the murder case of a man accused of the execution-style killings of a toddler and his father over a gambling debt.
The high court declined Khahn Dinh Phan's appeal that his death-penalty case be thrown out because he has not been brought to trial in nearly seven years, due in part to delays caused by the state's financially strained indigent defense system. But the court warned that Gwinnett County Superior Court needs to resolve Phan's case or risk that it will be dismissed if the delay becomes any more egregious.
"We warn the clock is still ticking," said the opinion by Chief Justice Carol Hunstein. "Further delays caused by state budget problems could well tip the scales ... in Phan’s favor.”
Hunstein wrote that the Phan case is an "object lesson in the perils" of underfunding the state's indigent fund, which has resulted in Phan being in the Gwinnett County jail since his arrest in March 2005. He is accused of the the Dec. 29, 2004, shootings of a Vietnamese couple and their 2-year-old son in their Lilburn home.
Hung Thai, 37, and his son, Hugh Thai, both died from bullet wounds to the back of the head. Hoangoah Ta, the wife and mother, survived but remained in a coma for seven weeks before returning to her native Vietnam that February. A Gwinnett police detective interviewed her by phone and she identified Phan as the shooter.
The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council hired attorneys Bruce Harvey and Christopher Adams to represent Phan. But the lawyers said they were never properly funded, never receiving the money to hire experts or to travel to Vietnam to interview the surviving eyewitness. In 2009, the Gwinnett Superior Court denied Phan’s motion to dismiss his charges due to the state’s failure to fund his defense against the death penalty and due to the violation of his right to a speedy trial.
Gwinnett Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor, who denied the motion, was ordered by the Georgia Supreme Court to determine if there was a "systematic breakdown" in the public defender system that undermined Phan's right to a fair trial. Batchelor ordered the council’s “in-house” capital defender division to replace Adams and Harvey to allow the case to go forward.
Harvey and Adams again appealed again, but the justices said Phan could still receive a fair trial and in 2010, Batchelor was permitted to replace Adams and Harvey.
In her ruling Hunstein, however, emphasized the case raised a number of troubling issues.
“We emphasize that our determination that the trial court acted within its discretion should in no way be construed as an endorsement of the system that has led us down this tortuous path thus far,” the opinion said. “The interests of no one -- neither prosecutors nor defendants, victims nor taxpayers -- are served by the uncertainty and delay attending to a chronically underfunded indigent defense system.”
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