On the morning of March 11, 2005, Brian Nichols embarked on one of the most notorious crime sprees in recent American history. Nichols, a thirty-three-year-old African-American, was being retried on rape charges in Atlanta and was in custody at the Fulton County Courthouse, where his first trial had ended in a hung jury. In a holding cell on the eighth floor, where he was changing into the street clothes that he was to wear in court, he overpowered a sheriff’s deputy and stole her gun. Then Nichols entered the courtroom and shot and killed Judge Rowland Barnes as well as the court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau, before escaping down a stairwell. On the sidewalk outside the building, he shot and killed another deputy sheriff, Hoyt Teasley.

A multiple-murder case illustrates a paradox in death-penalty law. GUY BILLOUT

Nichols immediately became the object of a frenzied manhunt in the Atlanta area. Over the next few hours, he hijacked as many as five cars and, apparently while looking for shelter, murdered a federal agent, David Wilhelm. Finally, Nichols took as hostage a woman named Ashley Smith and held her in her apartment in the suburb of Duluth for seven hours, until she persuaded him to surrender to the authorities.

Paul L. Howard, Jr., the district attorney of Fulton County, announced that he would seek the death penalty against Nichols. The case appeared to be open-and-shut: the first two murders, of the Judge and the court reporter, took place in front of several witnesses, and Nichols confessed to all four of the killings in statements to police. But almost three years later the case has stalled, caught in a bitter dispute over funding for Nichols’s defense team, which has so far been paid about $1.2 million by the state of Georgia. The state agency responsible for indigent defense has run out of money, and other cases are at risk of being delayed or derailed. Jury selection in Nichols’s trial, which began more than a year ago, has not been, and may never be, completed. The prosecutor has petitioned, so far unsuccessfully, to have the trial judge removed from the case and to change the defense team. During a recent hearing, the judge, Hilton Fuller, implored members of the public to “write me an anonymous letter” with suggestions about how to bring the case to trial. Some Georgia legislators, furious about the delays, have advocated impeaching Judge Fuller.

The Nichols case illustrates a troubling paradox in death-penalty jurisprudence: the more heinous a crime—and the more incontrovertible the evidence of a defendant’s guilt—the greater the cost of the defense may be. Death-penalty trials require juries not only to determine whether the defendant is guilty but also to make other complex moral judgments—why a defendant committed a crime, whether he is likely to do so again, what punishment fits the crime. Defendants are entitled to often costly expert assistance, including the services of psychiatrists, as they prepare their cases. Yet spending large sums of public money on the defense of capital cases is politically incendiary, and in Georgia the consequences may be cataclysmic. According to Stephen B. Bright, the senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta, “We are just now starting to see the ripple effect of Nichols. The question now is whether the whole thing is going to come crashing down.”

In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled, in Gideon v. Wainwright, that indigent criminal defendants must be provided with lawyers free of charge. But the Court allowed local officials to decide whether to establish full-time staffs of defense lawyers for the poor or to assign private lawyers on a case-by-case basis, as well as to determine how much the government should pay for them. Until 2005, Georgia, like many states, lacked a coherent plan for providing attorneys. “Georgia has a hundred and fifty-nine counties, and each one had a different system of hiring lawyers for the poor,” Bright told me.

For decades, Bright fought to change the system in Georgia and, over the years, developed the weary patience of a liberal in a conservative state. He has led the small, tenuously financed Southern Center for Human Rights for twenty-six years, overseeing a staff of nine lawyers who fight against the death penalty and for improved prison conditions. By the nineteen-nineties, the indigent-defense system, hobbled by cronyism, incompetence, and under-funding, had become an embarrassment for the state, and there was a broad consensus for reform. In the spring of 2003, the state legislature, with Bright’s help, created public-defense offices for most of the state’s forty-nine judicial circuits and a new agency, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, to oversee them. An office in Atlanta, now known as the Georgia Capital Defenders, was established to provide attorneys, all trained in the intricacies of death-penalty law, for indigent defendants in capital cases. In order to avoid the spectre of taxpayer money being used to pay for such an unpopular cause, the new law required that the defense lawyers’ compensation be derived from fees assessed on plaintiffs in lawsuits and other participants in the court system.

The new regime went into effect on January 1, 2005. Ten weeks later, Brian Nichols was taken to the holding cell near the courtroom to change his clothes.

Over three decades, Nichols’s life took a steady, then precipitous, descent from middle-class respectability to incomprehensible violence. He grew up in Baltimore, where his mother worked for the Internal Revenue Service and his father owned various small businesses. In 2003, Nichols’s parents, who had retired, moved to Africa, and his mother, Claritha, took a job with the Tanzania Revenue Authority. The couple were in Africa when they learned that their son had been charged with four murders.

Brian was a football player in high school, and his skills as a linebacker won him admission to Kutztown University, in rural Pennsylvania. Nichols left during his sophomore year, after three arrests for minor charges, including disorderly conduct. He eventually enrolled in Newberry College, in South Carolina, but was asked not to return to school when, two years later, he was charged with stealing audio equipment from a dorm room. In 1995, he moved to the Atlanta area, where again he got into trouble with the law: he was caught with marijuana and was on probation from 1996 to 1999. For a time, Nichols worked for UPS.

During his years in Atlanta, Nichols had a steady girlfriend, a corporate executive with an M.B.A., who was as accomplished as Nichols was feckless. At one point, Nichols lived with her in the suburb of Sandy Springs; he drove a BMW that she gave him, and they worshipped together at a Word of God church in nearby Suwanee.

In April, 2004, the couple broke up, but started dating again that summer. Nichols had been seeing another woman, who became pregnant. News of the pregnancy was apparently enough to persuade Nichols’s girlfriend to end their relationship for good. She began dating a minister at their church, which enraged Nichols. On two occasions in August, he confronted the minister outside the woman’s apartment. After Nichols threatened to commit suicide, his ex-girlfriend sent his mother an e-mail, in which she wrote, “Things between Brian and I are spiraling out of control.” Early on the morning of August 19th, Nichols again appeared at her apartment and, she later told police, raped her.

Nichols was arrested and held without bail. His first trial, before Judge Barnes, began on February 21, 2005, and he testified in his own defense. “From a defense perspective he was a very good witness,” Ash Joshi, the assistant district attorney who cross-examined Nichols, told me. “He would take my question and then turn toward the jury and give the answer, the way you would teach a witness to do it. He was a charismatic individual.” Nichols acknowledged that he was upset about his ex-girlfriend’s relationship with the minister. “There’s a section of the Bible that talks about qualifications for a pastor,” he testified. “It says that a pastor should be blameless, you know. A person not covetous, merciful.” But the core of Nichols’s defense was his claim that the sex had been consensual. “We ended up being intimate,” Nichols told the court. “It was with her consent, you know, which is why we’re here. And, you know, let me say this: as a man, I’ve never put my hands on a woman.” The jury could not agree on a verdict, splitting eight-to-four in favor of acquittal.

Judge Barnes ordered a retrial, which began on Monday, March 7th. The prosecutors called more witnesses this time, and the government lawyers felt confident that they would win the case. Nichols apparently agreed. At the lunch break on Wednesday, March 9th, he told Joshi, “You’re doing a much better job this time.” That evening, sheriff’s deputies found two shanks—thick pieces of metal—in Nichols’s shoes, and the next morning Judge Barnes called the lawyers into his chambers to discuss the matter. “We all decided that at the time of the verdict there would be a great deal more security in the courtroom,” Joshi said. “When that verdict comes out, the Judge said he wanted nothing on the defense table—no pens, no pencils, nothing he could use as a weapon. But the sad part was we mistakenly thought that, once we got the shanks away from him, his plot had been foiled.”

Most courts in Atlanta are housed in one of two buildings connected by sky bridges: the old Fulton County Courthouse, a Beaux Arts building dating from 1914, and, directly behind it, the Justice Center Tower, which was completed in 1995. By 2005, virtually all of the judges had moved to courtrooms in the tower, but Judge Barnes preferred the homier charms of the older building.

Barnes, who was sixty-four at the time of his death, was a popular judge, a bearded, genial man who had been on the bench since 1998. At 8:30 A.M., on Friday, March 11th, an hour before Nichols’s trial was to resume, Barnes heard a legal argument on a motion in a contract dispute. Richard Robbins, a partner in a large Atlanta law firm, who had argued many cases before Judge Barnes, was representing the plaintiff. “As soon as he took the bench that morning, I could tell I was going to win—just the look on his face,” Robbins told me. One of the lawyers for the defendant spoke first. “She was going on and on, and I was watching the clock,” Robbins recalled. “It was within a moment or two of nine. She said I had argued a contrary position in an earlier case. And Judge Barnes looked at me and smiled, and said, ‘Wait a minute, you mean our Mr. Robbins?’ And he winked at me.

“Then I heard a loud sound. Nichols had come into the courtroom and shot the Judge and shot the court reporter, but I honestly don’t have a memory of seeing him do that. The first thing I have a memory of is seeing the Judge slump over. I knew he was dead. Then Nichols was standing right in front of me. I remember thinking he was very nice-looking. He looked like a law clerk, not the usual kind of thug you see around the courthouse. And I remember thinking, He’s going to kill the prosecutor, too, and I am at the prosecution table. He had this totally calm, methodical look on his face. There was no point in lying down or hiding. I thought, He’s going to shoot me next.”

Almost three years later, Judge Barnes’s courtroom remains a crime scene, its main door locked and shielded from view by a large folding screen. Robbins took me to the hall to describe what happened next. “I ran straight ahead, right here, to one of the sky bridges to the new building,” he said. “Nichols didn’t follow me, but turned left and went down the stairs. As I was running in one direction, I saw a deputy running after Nichols to the stairs. That was Hoyt Teasley, and Nichols killed him when they got to the sidewalk. When I got to the new tower, I pushed through a locked security door like it wasn’t even there. After about an hour, I realized that I had broken my hand on it.”

The response by law-enforcement officials to Nichols’s crimes was marred by terrible errors. After the shanks were discovered, Judge Barnes said he wanted the sheriff’s department, which handles security in the courthouse, to provide Nichols with additional guards, yet he was escorted to court by a single female deputy sheriff. Part of his attack on the deputy was captured by surveillance cameras, but no one was monitoring them. The Atlanta police, who did not begin searching for Nichols until forty minutes after the first shootings, failed to seal off access to two parking garages where Nichols had been seen; he escaped from both. During a subsequent investigation, five sheriff’s deputies were found to have lied about their actions with regard to Nichols. Eight deputies were fired for misconduct, all but two of whom were later rehired.

The courts have done little better in handling Nichols’s case. In the nineteen-seventies, the Supreme Court struck down mandatory death-penalty laws passed by many states. Instead, after jurors in a capital case find a defendant guilty, there is now a separate mini-trial, known as the penalty phase, in which they decide whether to impose a death sentence. “Ever since the Court started allowing the death penalty again, it has been trying to make it a rational process—make sure that jurors have legitimate reasons for imposing death,” Carol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School, said. “So the Court says the state must list any of the so-called ‘aggravating factors’ that justify a death sentence, like murder of more than one person, or murder of a law-enforcement officer.” At the same time, the Court ruled that defendants may present evidence—known as mitigating factors—suggesting why they do not deserve the death penalty. “The jury has to be free to consider anything about the defendant that might call for a sentence of less than death,” Steiker said.