Rare Breed - profiles of three defense lawyers who work death penalty cases, Stephen Bright, Bryan Stevenson, and John Holderidge

"It is incredibly engaging and debilitating," he said. Defending the rights of the imprisoned is a crucial piece in the broader movement for human rights, and he loves being a part of it all. But the poverty of his clients' lives overwhelms him at times. Many are victims of "horrific violence and neglect," and he is almost formulaic about the pattern of their suffering: abused at 3, sexually assaulted at 6, discarded at 9, when many of them began experimenting with drugs.

"As a society, we have used punishment and incarceration as a mechanism for responding to the absence of hope in people's lives. We are still dealing with the legacy of racism," he adds, "and we don't value the needs of the poor."

The needs of capital defense attorneys are not a high priority either, according to John Holderidge. Holderidge, who "has always been against the death penalty," took on his fast capital case while working as a summer associate with a prominent Wall Street firm, Cahill Gordon Rindell. He won the appeal and, after graduating from law school, got a grant from the American Civil Liberties Union to go South.

Initially, he worked at the trial level. "I wanted to focus on first appeal because that is where you have the best chance of saving someone's life," he said. But he began to feel like a man pulling a drowning person from a river of dying people.

"I would go into a county and they might have seven death penalty cases. I could save one person's life but I found that everyone else was getting killed."

So Holderidge turned his attention to the bigger problem -- woefully underfunded and overworked public defenders. People on death row were getting lawyers who had no time.

Or money. In some Louisiana parishes Holderidge observed, public defenders were juggling 600 felony cases -- three to four times the national average -- plus three or four capital cases.

Mississippi was no better. The two part-time public defenders in Jones County, operating on a budget of $32,000, had "650 felony cases between them" and eight capital trials as well, Holderidge said.

Until fairly recently, both states imposed a $1,000 cap on capital trials, according to Holderidge. This ridiculously low fee was expected to cover overhead costs as well as hours (which could number in the hundreds) for legal work on a trial. The incredible lack of funds meant that attorneys defending capital clients were faced with a terrible choice, Holderidge said. "You go into bankruptcy or you don't defend your client well."

In 1990, the Mississippi Supreme Court adjusted state funding for capital cases and allotted an hourly fee of "approximately $25" for overhead costs, Holderidge said. But the $1,000 cap on trial fees remained. In 1993, the Louisiana Supreme allocated $57 an hour to cover fees and overhead costs.

This year, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association honored Holderidge with the Life in the Balance Achievement Award for his work in Mississippi and Louisiana "representing not only the poorest clients but the poorest lawyers." His work contributed to the establishment of a capital trial and post-conviction unit in Mississippi. The state has allocated an annual budget of $750,000 for four attorneys who specialize in capital representation.