The Sunday New York Times has an editorial, "Don't Listen to What the Man Says."
If the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, wanted to announce that it was getting out of the fairness business, it could hardly have done better than its decision last week in the case of Keith Bowles. The court took away Mr. Bowles’s right to challenge his murder conviction in a ruling that was so wrong and mean-spirited that it seemed like an outtake from MTV’s practical joke show “Punk’d.”
Mr. Bowles, an Ohio inmate, challenged his conviction in federal district court and lost. The court told Mr. Bowles that he had until Feb. 27 to appeal. He filed the appeal on Feb. 26, and was ready to argue why he was wrongly convicted. But it turned out the district court made a mistake. The appeal should have been filed by Feb. 24.
The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, that Mr. Bowles was out of luck, and his appeal was invalid. So much for heeding a federal judge.
The decision was wrong for many reasons. The Supreme Court has made clear in its past rulings that deadlines like this are not make-or-break. Appeals could still be heard, the court recognized in the past, if there were “unique circumstances” that accounted for the delay. Clearly, following an order from a federal judge is such a circumstance.
An earlier post is here. Howard Bashman has this Law.com column on the topic.
The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling last week in Bowles v. Russell contains an important reminder for lawyers who handle appeals before the intermediate federal appellate courts: If an appeal is not filed within the time provided by federal statute, the appeal cannot be heard and decided on the merits.
And Howard notes a Washington Post editorial, "Beware of the Judge."
This may not be the most momentous legal issue of the term -- unless, of course, you are Mr. Bowles -- but it is a sad example of miserly jurisprudence. The majority opinion, by Justice Clarence Thomas, insisted that the court was left with no choice but to dismiss the case; these time limits, Justice Thomas said, are "jurisdictional," and failing to comply with them, for whatever reason, divests courts of the ability to hear the claim. In less legalistic language: tough luck.
In fact, as the dissent by Justice David H. Souter pointed out, the majority was not in any way bound to reach this manifestly unjust result; indeed, it had to ignore and overrule precedents to keep Mr. Bowles out of court. In a pair of cases in the 1960s, the court had said that failing to meet statutory filing deadlines could be excused in "unique circumstances." The majority dismissed those cases on the grounds of their "40-year slumber" and said they were wrongly decided in any event.
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