US Supreme Court
This past Tuesday, in a 5-4 vote along traditional liberal-conservative lines with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy as the swing, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in McQuiggin v. Perkins, that in certain instances would allow imprisoned convicts to file habeas corpus motions challenging their convictions even after firm filing deadlines had passed.
The operative federal law is the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, passed during the Clinton administration. We joined the campaign for the passage of that act. Here’s why we think the high court acted properly in contravening part of it.
Habeas corpus – literally, “that you have the body,” in Latin – goes back to the era of English common law and gives imprisoned petitioners the right to be brought to court to have their grievances or objections to detention or sentencing reviewed. But by the time the 1996 law was enacted, habeas pleadings had evolved into an endless round of motions, usually beginning with a claim of ineffective trial counsel and then degenerating into the smallest and most arcane points of procedure.
What we liked about the law was that it put a finite limit on those endless rounds of state and federal habeas appeals that could keep a death penalty case going long enough so that the killer ended up dying of old age rather than execution. In one case we’ve written about – the unspeakably brutal sexual assault and murder of Marine Lance Corporal Suzanne Collins – her murderer Sedley Alley was on death row longer than Suzanne was alive. And unfortunately, this is not an uncommon circumstance.
But there are some cases in which the jury and the various appeals courts just plain get it wrong, and the West Memphis Three prosecution in Arkansas was one of them. By the time you’ve been through federal habeas and its state equivalent – still usually more than once – all of the procedural issues have been aired out.
On the other hand, if you have a credible claim of actual innocence, together with facts and evidence to back it up, the latest Supreme Court ruling will not let technical obstacles such as missed deadlines stand in the way of that claim being heard. Our guess is that such cases will be limited, and that the threshold for establishing a claim should be high.
The conservative wing of the court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia who wrote the opinion for the minority, charged that the liberal justices were making up their own laws rather than interpreting and enforcing those on the books. But in our opinion, procedure should never get in the way of justice.
For law and order types like us, who believe in the death penalty or long sentences for certain crimes, making sure that an individual has not been wrongly convicted is worth one more round. But it should be reserved for instances in which the stakes are total exoneration if the case has merit, and nothing short of that.
