Sometimes a man who represents himself doesn't have a fool for a client
The Massachusetts Appeals Court today tossed the assault-and-battery conviction of a Boston man who represented himself in court, because he only orally agreed to give up his rights to a lawyer and a trial by jury.
In its ruling, the court said even judges at busy Boston Municipal Court need to take the time to ensure a defendant is in his right mind before letting him proceed without a lawyer or jury, even if he tells them he's a jailhouse lawyer who has won cases before.
Mark Leonardi was questioned only briefly by three separate judges before he went to trial - and the second and third relied on his assurances about what the earlier judges had decided. The court said Leonardi's mental faculties were at issue because he had suffered an epileptic seizure in court.
We acknowledge and are sympathetic to the fact that in our busy trial courts, case management constraints require at times that defendants appear before multiple judges. In this case, however, several unintended consequences appear to have resulted from the fact that no single judge oversaw the defendant's waivers and that each judge relied on the others for the necessary inquiry into the defendant's state of mind. Among these, no written counsel waiver was obtained, contrary to the mandate of [court rules]. The absence of a written counsel waiver does not alone require reversal, provided there is sufficient other evidence in the record to demonstrate that the waiver was voluntary and intelligent. ... Here, however, the absence of a written counsel waiver is indicative of the incomplete nature of the truncated interactions the defendant had with three different judges concerning the waivers of his constitutional rights.
