Via @joelrosenberg (that's his twitter name, in case you didn't know), though around here he's generally known as J-dog, comes this horrific story from the St. Petersburg Times.

For two days, a Hillsborough judge watched a young lawyer struggle through a murder defense and lose.

Then, as a deadline loomed, Circuit Judge William Fuente waited for customary defense motions to overturn the Dec. 4 conviction or request a new trial.

No motions came.

Finally on Monday, Fuente took the rare step of initiating his own order of a new trial for defendant David Rolon, saying defense attorney Byron T. Christopher "did not render effective assistance" and didn't adequately prepare for trial.

"The defendant, through no fault of his own, did not receive a fair and impartial trial," Fuente wrote in a four-page order.

It isn't supposed to happen this way.  Defenders of the faith swear that lawyers, duly admitted to practice, cannot be incompetent.  Yet they sometimes are.  Thankfully, and I mean that in an extreme sense, Judge Fuente did his job and protected the defendant from his own lawyer's incompetence.  Other judges might have decided that the defendant made his bed, so screw him.

So who is this lawyer, defending a man accused of murder?

Christopher, 30, privately retained as Rolon's attorney, didn't return calls for comments. Numerous other attempts by the Times to reach him Tuesday were unsuccessful.

The Florida Bar Association lists Christopher as a member of its Young Lawyer's Division. Public records show he began work as an assistant Hillsborough state attorney in April 2005, the same month he was admitted to the Florida Bar. Five months later, Christopher no longer worked for the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office. It was unclear Tuesday why he left.

Privately retained.  Former state attorney.  Member of the FBA, Young Lawyer's Division.  I wonder what his marketing blawg would look like?

A while back, there was a heated debate here about whether it was demeaning to the bar to state that there are lawyers out there who are not competent to serve the purpose for which they were retained.  The sad fact is that the defendant in this murder case no doubt believed that he had retained competent counsel to represent him at trial.  He was wrong.  He was disastrously wrong.  But for the Judge's willingness to step into the middle and protect this defendant's 6th Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel, sua sponte, he might well have the rest of his life in prison to ponder just how wrong he was.

Some cases, it gets this bad.  And some trials, there won't be a Judge Fuentes to make sure that the defendant is not convicted in the absence of effective assistance of counsel. 

Update:  Florida attorney Byron T. Christopher will not be publicly humiliated without fighting back.  Oh no.  From the Other Times:

"I feel like he wanted to embarrass me," Christopher, 30, said of an order filed Monday by Circuit Judge William Fuente, calling for a new trial because Christopher hadn't rendered effective assistance to his client.

Christopher said Rolon found him through word of mouth, which is how he says he gets 98 percent of his clients. 

"I'm an excellent attorney," he said. "But when you can't put on a defense, what can you do?"

He said Circuit Judge Ronald Ficcarotta denied a request to withdraw from the case after Christopher complained Rolon paid only 25 percent of what he owed.

Christopher said he spent 40 hours preparing a defense for Rolon that Fuente ruled inadmissible just before the Dec. 3 trial began. Despite the setback, Christopher said he "gave 110 percent" to Rolon's case.

Oh, this smells like it requires another post on the subject of getting paid versus doing your job.  But there is one additional aspect that shouldn't go unnotice:

Fuente noted in his order that Christopher told jurors he had spent less than five minutes reviewing Rolon's testimony before putting him on the witness stand. Christopher said he did so to show jurors that Rolon hadn't been coached into what to say.

Alternate juror Delores S. McCain told the Times that it appeared Rolon had poor legal representation. She said Christopher fumbled with his note pad and his questions seemed to confuse the defendant.

"I think the jury's perception of me was based on the way the judge was treating me," Christopher said.

Somehow, I think that Chistopher may be wrong about this.