How bad do your lawyers have to be for you to get a new trial… in a death penalty case?

The New York Times reports a ridiculous case that was heard by the Supreme Court, which seems to come right out of the movie Brazil, in which a combination of events leads to a defendant in a capital murder case losing his rights to appeal in the state of Alabama. According to the article, a court had sent its ruling to two associates at a firm in New York who had work on behalf of defendant Cory Maples. The problems started when the associates left. The firm then returned the judgment to the court marked “returned to sender”. The court clerk received the envelope and did nothing. The local counsel of record also failed to follow up with the appeal. Eventually, the window that defendants have to file appeals elapsed, at which point the prosecutor seemingly gloated directly to Mr. Maples.

The only good news in this case is that the Supreme Court is now hearing it, and at least in oral arguments they seem to have been as incensed at the callous treatment of a defendant as one would hope they should be.

So now my questions, and I have many:

Why is it that this case had to get to the Supreme Court in the first place? Is administrative incompetence grounds for rushing to kill someone?
Does the current state of law and societal view towards prosecutorial discretion need correction? Here, in a case where the prosecutor clearly could have weighed in to prevent a travesty, he instead seemingly chose to gloat. Doesn’t that argue for stronger judicial oversight?
Should there be sanctions against the local lawyer who failed to at all follow up in a death penalty case?
In this case, how broadly should the Court rule? They could simply state that the confluence of events led to a perverse situation that requires redress, and narrowly rule, or they could require that states shoulder at least some burden to see that defendants are receiving fair treatment. What would that look like?
If this is what happens in death penalty cases, what sort of miscarriages of justice are taking place in other cases, and how do we know?

What do you think?

What is a Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Youths?

Scales of Justice

[Corrected information, thanks to Ken Durazzo.]

The punishment should fit the crime.

This is the general basis for the Eighth Amendment, and it’s one that has been largely ignored in the United States. Now the New York Times reports on a case that the Supreme Court has decided to hear, regarding people convicted as youths who are serving life sentences. As the Times mentions, all 100 such people in the world live in the United States, and of those, 77 are in Florida. One case involves Terrance Graham who committed armed burglary at the age of 16. In another instance, a child was sent to prison for life for rape at the age of 13. That’s a terrible offense, but is it worth a life term?

It is often the case that the pendulum starts swinging the other way, when absurd cases such as Graham’s comes to the fore. Here now is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to challenge the state on whether the punishment suits the crime. Explain to me the circumstances under which a child should go to jail for life for robbery. I can’t fathom such a situation. I hope the Supreme Court won’t either, in which case, we may see some very interesting new doctrine on the subject in the next year.

Obama v. McCain: The Courts. This one IS a Knockout

After my last lengthy spewage about Foreign Policy, I figured I’d take on something a little more straight forward. One of the largest and most lasting powers a president has is his ability to appoint judges to courts, and justices to the Supreme Court. The issues surrounding the courts are not just abortion, but privacy, freedom of speech, freedom from religion, gun control (or lack thereof), and the ability of the government to protect our environment for the next generation, just to name a few.

The current administration placed Samuel Alito and John Roberts onto the Supreme Court, making it the most conservative court in well over a century, probably dating as far back as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which give you some idea just how far backwards we have gone. The next administration will likely see at least one Supreme Court nomination in the next four years. Justice Stevens is 88 years old. It’s almost hard to imagine how the court could shift to the right any further ith Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, considered the center of the court, but that is precisely what could happen.

Here the record of Senator McCain is crystal clear. He hasn’t waivered from it one bit. McCain is anti-choice, and he has further stated that he would like to replace the existing left side of the bench (Stevens, Ginsberg, Souter, Bryer) with people from the right. That doesn’t suit me well at all. The people on the right side of the bench, aside from taking away a woman’s right to choose, also voted to gut the Court’s own power by all but taking on Marbury v. Madison. A dysfunctional 3rd branch of the government is not what our founders had in mind.

Barack Obama is a lawyer and has tought at the University of Chicago. He is pro-choice, and in general has a more studied approach that is not subject to the strictness of ideology. This in part leaves me uncomfortable. However, given the two individuals in play, the choice is clear. McCain scores a whopping F and a low one at that on his handling of the court, while we’ll give Obama a tentative B, with perhaps as much as 70 points between them on this issue.

Exclusionary Rule In Trouble

The police are supposed to be our protectors, but in the control of a despot, they are oppressors. The Supreme Court formally recognized early in the 20th Century that the police could not be allowed to get away with crimes in order to find and convict the guilty. Thus was born the Exclusionary Rule. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials have, on the one hand, complained about the rule, and on the other hand, managed to provide generally strong protection against criminals without having to violate it. According to this article by the New York Times, the United States is unique in its adherence to the rule. The article goes on to say that we may not adhere in the same way for long.

While it might sound reasonable to allow a judge to hold a hearing to determine whether or not tainted evidence should be allowed, we should remember that the rule is there to protect us against wanton police abuse and corruption, that the government has a vast amount of coercive power, and that it incredibly hard to identify abuse, absent the rule. A police officer already has enormous abilities to cite, arrest, and search individuals, pragmatically speaking without cause. Now the Court will consider weakening protections against those cases where the situation is blatant.

Keeping in mind that no rule is perfect, and that some criminals have been able to use the exclusionary rule to get their cases dismissed, the Court should tread carefully in an area where despotism looms, especially when we can argue that the rule has done its job well.

Courting Disaster: Supreme Court lets guns into DC

I have yet to read the opinion of the Court as to the reasoning of this week’s 2nd amendment ruling, but let’s discuss just one point. Four justices earlier were upset that the court upheld Habeus Corpus, and the clear basis of their argument was not strict construction, but rather fear of attack. Those same four justices plus Justice Kennedy made use of strict construction in the DC opinion. That to me says that at least those four justices are perfectly comfortable with our government “defending” us against others, but they’re not comfortable with the government defending us against each other. Put another way, we can abuse others as much as we want, but heaven forbid we wish to assert government authority against our own citizenry.