Category: Habeas Corpus

Viet Dinh has this op-ed in the WSJ on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at the age of 93. Also in WSJ is this editorial, remembering her as a champion of federalism. And indeed she was. Her opinion for the court in Coleman v. Thompson begins, “This is a case about federalism.” As one of the few state court judges elevated to the high court, she had a major role in reining in the excesses of lower federal courts. Those courts often effectively negated the considered decisions of the highest state courts merely because they disagreed with them on debatable points, even though Congress has never given any federal court but the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over state courts. When the Supreme Court did get around to resolving the disagreement, it was not unusual for it to decide the state courts had been right and the lower federal courts wrong, especially in the Ninth Circuit.

When Congress went a big step further in that direction than the Supreme Court had done, and farther than Justice O’Connor thought was within the judicial power, she wrote the critical part of the opinion of the court in Williams v. Taylor, enforcing the most important reform as it was written and intended and upholding it as constitutional. Continue reading . . .

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued a major decision on the finality of judgments in Jones v. Hendrix, No. 21-857. The Court rejected an attempt by the petitioner to do “an end-run around AEDPA,” i.e., the limits on collateral review of convictions enacted by Congress in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Even more important, the Court has finally rejected the notion that the Suspension Clause of the Constitution requires collateral review of final judgments by courts of general jurisdiction. That clause is limited to the scope of habeas corpus understood at the time, which did not include such review. Congress may authorize such review, of course, but it is fully capable of imposing such limits as deems to be good policy.

We will have more to say on this important decision later.

CJLF’s brief in this case is available here.

The U.S. Supreme Court today vacated an Arizona Supreme Court decision denying a murderer’s challenge to his death sentence. At the time the high court took up the case, CJLF considered filing an amicus brief in support of the state but decided we really couldn’t support the Arizona court’s decision. I am not at all surprised at the outcome but a bit surprised the state got four votes. Continue reading . . .

The U.S. Supreme Court has concluded its oral argument in Jones v. Hendrix.  The question is whether federal prisoners who have already had an appeal and one or more collateral reviews of their convictions can use the “saving clause” of 28 U.S.C. §2255(e) to bring habeas corpus petitions in certain cases in which Congress has forbidden a successive 2255 petition.

The claim is that 2255(e) preserves claims that were traditionally cognizable in habeas despite the 1996 amendment that limited successive petitions. It is difficult to make a prediction from argument. Several of the justices said little or nothing. However, I was encouraged that some justices questioned what point in habeas history we should be looking at. The availability of habeas corpus has varied widely throughout history. The kind of claim at issue in this case would not have been cognizable in early America, as documented in our brief in this case. Continue reading . . .

When Congress enacted the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the first title was habeas corpus reform. It was intended to achieve the “effective death penalty” part by drastically cutting the delays in carrying out capital sentencing, at least the part attributable to the federal courts.

It did not work because it was not properly implemented. But 26 years later we may finally see that change. Today’s decision of the Supreme Court in Shoop v. Twyford, No. 21-511 is a large step in that direction. Continue reading . . .

Are Acts of Congress the law of the land, to be respected by the courts and implemented as intended, or are they merely inconvenient obstacles to the policies preferred by judges, to be danced around at will? That was the unstated question beneath the case of Shinn v. Ramirez, No. 20-1009, decided by the Supreme Court today.

The case involves the long-standing policy question of when a federal court hearing a habeas corpus petition by a state prisoner can second-guess the judgment of the state courts in a case already fully litigated there. The answer to that question has ebbed and flowed throughout American history, as relative confidence in federal v. state courts has varied. The answer has varied from “never” (1789) to “nearly always” (1963) and various points in between. Congress and the Supreme Court have both had their roles, but on this aspect of habeas corpus the Court has always acknowledged that Congress is boss, at least nominally.

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the Supreme Court was gradually tightening up on relitigation, pulling back reins that had been loosened in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1992, the Court decided in Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes that a habeas petitioner who wanted an evidentiary hearing in federal court to present evidence that he could have presented in state court but failed to would not get one unless he showed good cause for his previous failure and resulting prejudice.

This is one of a number of rules that I call “speak now or forever hold your peace” rules. When the system provides a time and forum to make your claim, you have to make it then and there or lose it. Without such rules, Yogi Berra notwithstanding, a case isn’t over even when it’s over. More prosaically, these rules are called “procedural default rules.” Continue reading . . .