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Mostcapital offences are unbailable, or bail is set so high as to be absolutely inaccessible to any but the affluent. This means that in the capital case every kind of activity outside the jail – the marshalling of testimony, the verification of facts – must be carried on by somebody other than the defendant. This means money. If I were charged with murder, and if my defense (which I myself knew to be true) were that the deceased had threatened to kill me with a knife (as in the Arizona case mentioned in Chapter 6), I would want a through professional investigation conducted into the habits of the deceased with respect to carrying and threatening to use knives. I would want to my own people looking into the question whether  traces might exist – such as, say, the story of a hardware-store clerk – that connected that knife with the deceased. I would want to find out as much as I could about his prior record of arrests for violent crimes, of psychiatric confinement, and so on. I would want to have located and interviewed all possible witness to his demeanor and words just prior to our private meeting. Defense than he can afford a year’s cruise around the world on a luxury liner. He many luck out, one way or another. But he will be very heavily handicapped from the beginning.

Now this (even at this early stage) readily transposes into the key of possible, and increasingly probable, erroe; if a defense cannot be presented in the best possible manner, the chances of even a valid defense’s being rejected are obviously increased. To the defendant, the finding of that knife may mean the difference between life and death; to the rest of us, the defendant’s not finding it may mean that the court and jury, acting for us as a society, will overrule a self-defense plea that was actually valied, and sentence to death the wrong man – a kind of moral death for all of us. But we are not ready to furnish poor defendants with really adequate resources for the development of a defense, by investigation at early stages while the trail is still warm. Even if we were, the resources in manpower do not exist. We are running a system, therefore, which from the very beginning – from the hours and days following arrest – so operates as to make it enormously more difficult for the poor to bring out all the truth than it is for the well-to-do to bring out all the truth. This is, of course, just another way of saying that both convinction and convinction by mistake are from the beginning made much more likely for the poor.   

 Excerpted from “Capital Punishment” by Charles Black Jr.