ATLANTA  A man awaiting trial in a Georgia prison has spent the last eight months without a lawyer while prosecutors prepare a death penalty case against him, a lawsuit brought on his behalf says.

The suit, filed for Jamie R. Weis by four Atlanta lawyers, calls the lapse in legal representation “an unprecedented deprivation of counsel in modern times.” It names as defendants two leaders of Georgia’s public defender system.

“There’s nothing more fundamental and more important to somebody facing the death penalty than adequate counsel,” said one of the lawyers, Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “The idea that somebody would go even one week without a lawyer is unthinkable.”

Mr. Weis, 31, who is charged with murder, was initially represented by two lawyers in private practice, the suit says, but the state’s public defender system did not have the money to pay them, and they were removed from the case in November 2007. Two public defense lawyers were then assigned. But they too were removed, having objected that they did not have the time or resources for a capital case.