That's the title of an editorial published by the New York Times regarding yesterday's Supreme Court rulings in criminal cases, Trevino and Perkins.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down two important criminal procedure decisions,
both allowing defendants to seek habeas corpus review of their
convictions in federal court. The 5-to-4 majority, with Justice Anthony
Kennedy joining the court’s four moderate liberals, reached the right
result in each case. But, in a larger sense, the two decisions show how
much the scope of habeas review has been curtailed by the Supreme Court
in the last three decades, so that it now must work around earlier
precedents to avoid doing injustice.
In a case from Texas, Trevino v. Thaler,
the court ruled that a death-row inmate in Texas can make the claim of
ineffective counsel for the first time in a federal habeas petition
because the rules of Texas procedure made it virtually impossible for
him to raise that issue during an appeal in state court.
And:
The Michigan and Texas cases show how heavily engaged the court has
gotten in the regulation of criminal justice. Even when the court does
the right thing, as it did in these two cases, it often appears to be
finding exceptions to harsh rules that it created or upheld in earlier
cases. In the Texas case, the court further tinkered with “the machinery
of death,” to use Justice Harry Blackmun’s phrase, rather than doing
what it should have done by now: shut down the machinery by abolishing
the death penalty.
"Divided Court, in 2 Rulings, Makes It Easier to Challenge Criminal Convictions," is the Times news coverage of the two cases, written by Adam Liptak.
In a pair of 5-to-4 decisions that divided
along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Tuesday made it easier for
inmates to challenge their convictions.
In McQuiggin v. Perkins,
No. 12-126, the majority said that a one-year filing deadline for
prisoners seeking federal review of their state court convictions under a 1996 law
may be relaxed if they present compelling evidence of their innocence.
The new “miscarriage of justice exception” to the deadline, Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority, “applies to a severely confined
category” — cases in which no reasonable juror aware of the new evidence
would have voted to convict the defendant.
The decision did not seem likely to help the prisoner whose case was
under review, but the exception it announced drew a barbed dissent from
Justice Antonin Scalia, who called the majority opinion “a series of
transparent non sequiturs” and “a flagrant breach of the separation of
powers.”
And:
In dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “there is not a whit of
precedential support” for the idea that the Supreme Court was entitled
to alter the deadline set out in the 1996 law. Chief Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas joined all of the dissent, and
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined most of it.
Justice Ginsburg dismissed the dissent as “bluster.”
In the second decision issued Tuesday, in Trevino v. Thaler, No.
11-10189, the same five-justice majority extended a ruling last year
that had allowed prisoners to challenge their state convictions in
federal courts based on the argument that their trial lawyers had been
ineffective, even though the prisoners had not raised the issue in
earlier proceedings.
In the decision last year, in Martinez v. Ryan,
a seven-justice majority considered Arizona’s criminal justice system,
which required claims of ineffective assistance of counsel to be raised
in a separate state post-conviction challenge, in which there is no
right to a lawyer, and not in the direct appeal from the conviction, in
which there is. The Supreme Court ruled that federal courts may hear
challenges to Arizona convictions based on claims of ineffective
assistance at trial if the prisoner had no lawyer in the separate
proceeding or if that lawyer was also ineffective.
“By deliberately choosing to move trial-ineffectiveness claims outside
the direct-appeal process, where counsel is constitutionally guaranteed,
the state significantly diminishes prisoners’ ability to file such
claims,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in the Martinez
decision.
The new case considered Texas’ system, which appears to encourage but
not require that such claims be raised in a separate proceeding. Justice
Breyer, writing for the majority, said that difference did not matter.
“What the Arizona law prohibited by explicit terms,” he wrote, “Texas
precludes as a matter of course.”
"Supremes Agree Texas Inmate Should Have Appeal Heard," is the Ausin Chronicle report by Jordan Smith.
A 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Texas death row inmate Carlos Trevino
may raise for the first time in his federal appeal a claim that his
trial lawyer was ineffective in not investigating and presenting
mitigating evidence at trial that may have spared his life.
The Court of Criminal Appeals and the federal district and
appeals courts previously ruled that Trevino forfeited that claim by not
raising it in his state habeas appeal; Trevino argues that the
appellate lawyer was also ineffective for not discovering and raising
the issue that his trial attorney's performance was deficient.
The ruling, penned by Justice Stephen Breyer, makes applicable to
Texas a 2012 ruling in an unrelated case from Arizona. In that case, the
court concluded that an inmate could revive in federal court a
state-court defaulted claim of ineffective assistance of counsel if
there was no meaningful way to previously raise the issue.
In arguing before the Supremes in February, the state argued that the ruling in that Arizona case – Martinez v. Ryan
– was not applicable to Texas because, unlike in Arizona, defendants
have an opportunity to first raise ineffective assistance claims on
their first, record-based direct appeal.
But because of deadlines and other constraints inherent in the Texas
legal scheme, there really becomes no ability to meaningfully raise on
direct appeal a claim of ineffective assistance at trial, the court
ruled.
"U.S. Supreme Court Expands Post-Conviction Appeals," is by Joy Diaz for KUT-FM News.
Jim Marcus with UT Law School’s Capital Punishment Clinic, says
today’s 5 to 4 decision means people will now be able to appeal their
convictions on the basis of poor representation even in federal court.
Marcus filed a “friend of the court brief” in the case of Treviño
v. Thaler.
“This is a capital case, the Treviño case,” Marcus said, “but this decision applies to all prisoners, not just death sentence prisoners.”
Even
with today’s Supreme Court decision, Marcus says it’s extremely
difficult to prove poor representation. Although sleeping attorneys are
not very common, he said poor representation by omission is widespread.
Slate posts, "An Innocent Extension," by Emily Bazelon, focused on the Perkins case.
In 1996, Congress cracked down on defendants who repeatedly try to go
to court to overturn their convictions. The Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), signed by President Bill Clinton, created a
thicket of new requirements for people in prison who file last-ditch
appeals—called habeas corpus petitions. The idea was that once you’ve
lost your first and only direct appeal, you should only get a single try
at habeas corpus (the “great writ,” dating from the 14th
century, that allows a prisoner to sue his warden for release). And you
were supposed to get moving quickly: The law generally imposed a new
deadline of one year from the date on which you lost your direct appeal.
Congress made an exception, however: If you say you have new
evidence, then you have one year from the day you could have discovered
it through “the exercise of due diligence.” But what if you miss the
deadline without any good excuse—and yet the new evidence could show
that you are innocent? On Tuesday, the Supreme Court widened what it called the “gateway”
to reviewing claims of actual innocence that are made long after the
one-year deadline expires. It’s a 5-4 decision, split between
liberals-plus-Kennedy and conservatives. The opinions, by Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia, read like a pitched battle in
a long-simmering war. At the end, Ginsburg succeeds in opening what she
calls a “gateway” to court for innocence claims that blow by the
one-year deadline. But it’s probably not wide enough for Floyd Perkins, the prisoner at the center of this case, to get his own habeas petition heard.
And:
For Scalia, the moral of the story is clear: Innocence doesn’t—and
shouldn’t—always win. “This court has never held that the Constitution
forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and
fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is
‘actually’ innocent,” he wrote in 2009. Scalia lost that time, too. But
in the end, the man he was writing about—Troy Davis—was
executed for the murder of a Georgia police officer even though seven
of the nine witnesses who testified against him at trial had recanted.
The Supreme Court ruling in Trevino v. Thaler is available in Adobe .pdf format; as is, McQuiggin v. Perkins.
Earlier coverage of Trevino and Perkins, at the links.