Confessed killer in Lauren Giddings dismemberment murder sues lawyer for malpractice
The contentious-yet-tenuous legal wranglings of Stephen McDaniel continue to confound and hassle some of the very people who helped keep him off death row.
A month after graduating from law school in 2011, McDaniel broke into the apartment of Lauren Giddings, his next-door neighbor and Mercer University law school classmate, then strangled her and cut up her body.
In 2014, McDaniel, now 32, pleaded guilty and described in open court his version of how Giddings was slain. Earlier this year, though, in a last-ditch form of appeal that he filed from prison, McDaniel claimed that the police and prosecutors — and his own lawyers — may have wronged him.
Then last Wednesday, on what would have been Giddings’ 34th birthday, McDaniel, in a handwritten civil filing claiming legal malpractice, sued one of his former defense attorneys for upward of $200,000. McDaniel’s lawsuit contends that Macon lawyer Floyd Buford mishandled a wrongful-death lawsuit that Giddings’ parents filed against McDaniel after the killing.
McDaniel, serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole, now claims that Buford settled the wrongful-death claim against McDaniel’s wishes. Under the settlement, McDaniel, should he ever earn any money, would owe the Giddings family up to $80 million.
But McDaniel contends there was an offer to settle, one that Buford ignored, that would have imposed no financial sanctions and required only that McDaniel never earn any money from a book about the murder, if he chose to write one.
An Atlanta lawyer familiar with the Giddings family’s suit said Wednesday that there was no such offer.
“That’s bull----,” said the lawyer, Kristin S. Tucker, who was one of Lauren Giddings’ closest friends.
Though McDaniel claims the settlement agreed to was reached against his wishes, his signature appears at the bottom of the consent judgment he is disputing. In fact, a few months after McDaniel was convicted, Buford said he drove to the state prison near Jackson where McDaniel was locked up to show the order to McDaniel in person.
“He was very familiar with it,” Buford said, adding that it was “an excellent deal” for McDaniel, in part, because it didn’t allow his victim’s family to garnish McDaniel’s prison account.
It is worth noting that Buford was part of a defense team that may have spared McDaniel’s life. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty against McDaniel and, in the end, they agreed to a guilty plea in exchange for a mandatory 30-year prison term, but with a chance for McDaniel to one day walk free.
Asked about the legal maneuverings of his former client, Buford said, “I’m dealing with a confessed killer who has a legal education and who apparently has a lot of time on his hands. I did an excellent job for him, and it is regrettable and sad that he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions.”
McDaniel’s law degree would seemingly come in handy for someone in his position — someone behind bars and looking for a way out.
In a required affidavit attached to his malpractice suit against Buford, McDaniel mentions how in college he “completed courses in Legal Ethics … and Legal Professionalism.”
To curtail frivolous filings, such lawsuits require the credentials and signature of an expert, typically a licensed attorney, one who in essence is attesting that, yes, legal malpractice has occurred.
McDaniel did graduate law school. But in the weeks afterward, while studying for the bar exam — which he never got to take — something happened. He murdered Lauren Giddings, got caught and was sent to prison. He never became a lawyer.
This story was originally published April 26, 2018 at 10:33 AM with the headline "Confessed killer in Lauren Giddings dismemberment murder sues lawyer for malpractice."