Adam Liptak's Sidebar column in today's New York Times is titled, "Reprieve May Be Last-Minute, but Justices’ Preparation Never Is." Here's the beginning:
John Balentine was an hour away from being put to death in Texas last month when the Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution.The unseemly and unsettling spectacle of a last-minute legal scramble in the shadow of the ultimate deadline, with the condemned inmate waiting for word of his fate just outside the death chamber, may suggest that the Supreme Court does not render considered justice when it is asked to halt an execution.
But it tries. Indeed, the court goes to extraordinary lengths to get ready, and its point person is a staff lawyer named Danny Bickell.
“Cases where there is an execution date,” he said with a sigh, “that’s where I come in.”
Mr. Bickell’s formal title is emergency applications clerk, but capital defense lawyers have an informal title for him, too. They call him the death clerk.
In remarks at a conference of lawyers specializing in federal death penalty work at a hotel here last month, Mr. Bickell provided a rare inside look at the Supreme Court’s oversight of the machinery of death in the United States.
It starts with a weekly update.
“Every Monday morning,” Mr. Bickell said, “I put out a list to the court of all the executions that are scheduled in the country in the next six or seven weeks, and that gets distributed to all of the justices.”
The Supreme Court clerk’s office is famously helpful to lawyers who have questions about the court’s rules and procedures, but in capital cases it goes further.
“As the date approaches,” Mr. Bickell said, referring to impending executions, “I will be in touch with the attorney general’s office. I will be in touch with you, if you are representing the inmate, and with the lower courts, trying to figure out what is pending below and what is likely to make its way up to the Supreme Court.
“Once we make contact about 10 days or two weeks before the scheduled execution, I will start asking you to forward me everything that you file in the lower courts. Once you forward it to me, I forward it on to the law clerks and to the justices so that they can begin reviewing the case.”
By the time Mr. Balentine’s stay application reached the court, then, the justices were up to speed on the issues presented in his case, which concerned how claims of incompetent legal work at a capital trial should be presented.
Under the Supreme Court’s rules, Mr. Balentine’s plea that his execution be stayed was addressed to Justice Antonin Scalia, who oversees the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
But individual justices almost never rule by themselves on requests to halt executions. “I would say 99.9 percent of the time the circuit justice is going to refer the application to the full court, and all nine justices are going to act on the application,” Mr. Bickell said.
Earlier coverage of John Balentine's case begins at the link.
You can also read more of Adam Liptak's Sidebar columns at the Times website.
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