By C1 Staff
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ordered a new hearing from an Arizona death-row inmate who said prison officials violated his constitutional right to counsel by reading a letter he sent to his attorney.
The White Mountain Independent reports that death-row inmate Scott Nordstrom claims an officer went beyond scanning his letter to his attorney, which was clearly marked ‘legal mail,’ and read the letter.
Arizona DOC officers are allowed to scan such mail for contraband and “suspicious features,” but they are not allowed to read it.
A divided three-judge panel of the appeals court agreed with Nordstrom that this forced him “to cease conveying critically sensitive information … to his attorney” and violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
The panel reversed a U.S. District Court judge’s decision to throw out the case and ordered the lower court to consider Nordstrom’s complaint.
Circuit Court Judge Jay S. Bybee responded with a dissenting opinion longer than the majority opinion: He said prison officials are not prohibited from reading legal letters “with an eye toward discovering illegal conduct.”
He also pointed out that Nordstrom had not shown any injury from the fact that an officer “on one occasion during his 17-year incarceration … read a single letter” to the inmate’s attorney.
One attorney working on Nordstrom’s case welcomed the majority opinion, saying that the inmate “just wants to prevent this from happening again.”
Nordstrom and Robert Jones were convicted in connection with a string of murder-robberies in the Tucson area in 1996. Nordstrom was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to death.
Jones was also convicted and then executed on Oct. 23, 2013.