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High court restricts federal intervention in ineffective-counsel cases

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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The Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for defendants to seek relief from federal courts on claims that their convictions in state court were tainted by ineffective counsel.
The 6-to-3 decision divided the court’s majority conservatives from its liberals. It will have the most direct effect on two of Arizona’s death row inmates, one of whom claims his state-appointed lawyer failed to pursue evidence that could have proven him innocent, and another who says his lawyer did little to try to prove the inmate’s intellectual disability.

But advocates say the ruling will resonate more widely, and implicates a subset of cases where defendants had bad lawyers both at their trials and in post-conviction appeals.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said a federal law that sought to streamline criminal appeals does not allow a federal court to conduct hearings or consider evidence “beyond the state-court record based on ineffective assistance of state postconviction counsel.”


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“In our dual-sovereign system, federal courts must afford unwavering respect to the centrality ‘of the trial of a criminal case in state court,’ ” wrote Thomas, referring to a court precedent. He added that intervention by federal courts is “an affront to the State and its citizens who returned a verdict of guilt after considering the evidence before them. Federal courts, years later, lack the competence and authority to relitigate a State’s criminal case.”
He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the rest of the court’s most consistently conservative justices: Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a stinging rebuttal, calling Thomas’s opinion “perverse” and “illogical,” and said that it “reduced to rubble” previous Supreme Court findings that the constitutional right to effective counsel is a “bedrock principle” in an adversary system of criminal justice.


With Monday’s ruling, “The Court hamstrings the federal authority to safeguard” the right, Sotomayor wrote. “The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
She was joined by the two other justices on the left, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.

The cases concerned two Arizona men who were convicted of brutal murders.
David Ramirez was convicted of fatally stabbing his girlfriend, Mary Ann Gortarez, and her 15-year-old daughter, Candie, in 1989. “Police also found physical evidence that Ramirez had raped Candie,” Thomas wrote. Ramirez claimed his lawyers in state proceedings failed to present evidence of a horrific childhood that might have led to a sentence of life imprisonment instead of death.


Barry Lee Jones was convicted of sexual assault, three counts of child abuse and felony murder after the 1994 death of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. Jones was convicted of beating the child to death. But his lawyer at the Supreme Court said previous lawyers had failed to present medical evidence that could have shown that the child sustained her injuries when she was not in Jones’s care. And his postconviction lawyer failed to develop a showing of his trial lawyer’s shortcoming, Jones claimed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit sided with both men, and Arizona brought the cases to the Supreme Court.
Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns wrote in an op-ed column in the New York Times that Jones “lost the lawyer lottery twice.” Her organization said the ability of federal courts to conduct evidentiary hearings into such claims was crucial.


“Since 1989, almost 3,000 people have been wrongfully convicted of crimes in the United States,” Swarns wrote. “And since 1973, 186 people condemned to death have been exonerated. Bad lawyering — including poor preparation, inadequate investigation and intrinsic bias — was a leading cause.”

But Thomas said the Supreme Court has found that federal review of state convictions is an extreme remedy reserved for the most extraordinary cases. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 imposes strict limits on federal courts, he wrote.
“Serial relitigation of final convictions undermines the finality that ‘is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law,’ ” Thomas wrote, quoting a previous Supreme Court case.
Sotomayor responded that it made no sense to limit federal review of ineffective-counsel claims to issues raised in the state court record.


“Ineffective-assistance claims frequently turn on errors of omission: evidence that was not obtained, witnesses that were not contacted, experts who were not retained, or investigative leads that were not pursued,” she wrote. “Demonstrating that counsel failed to take each of these measures by definition requires evidence beyond the trial record.”

She said the court missed the larger point of its ruling. “To put it bluntly: Two men whose trial attorneys did not provide even the bare minimum level of representation required by the Constitution may be executed because forces outside of their control prevented them from vindicating their constitutional right to counsel,” she wrote.
Washington lawyer Robert Loeb, who argued the case for Ramirez and Jones at the Supreme Court, said in a statement that the decision “means that a federal court can have evidence that someone, like Barry Jones, did not commit the crime supporting the death sentence, but that the court then is helpless to offer any relief.”


He said Congress should “immediately fix the problem the Court has created today.”

But organizations that support the death penalty said Congress already has acted.
“In 1996, Congress cracked down on the misuse of habeas corpus to second-guess judgments that have already been fully and fairly decided in state courts,” Criminal Justice Legal Foundation legal director Kent Scheidegger said in a statement. “Today’s decision affirms that federal courts cannot make up their own exceptions to evade that law.”
The cases are Shinn v. Ramirez and Shinn v. Jones.

 
Federal habeus procedure can be mind numbing in its distinctions, and this case is no exception (having actually read the opinion). With that said, my understanding is that this is largely a statutory case, so Congress can certainly amend the law if this is inconsistent with past or present intent. There is also the fact that the core of the defense argument becomes a bit circular, and particularly inamuch as rights to counsel don't really apply in post conviction habeus proceedings. Beyond that, I would also note that something like 8 judges on the 9th circuit en banc panel dissented from the 9th circuit en banc opinion, so this construction is hardly just the work of a few crazies. Finally, while Soto is correct that it would be nice if crim procedure opinions would refrain from the unfortunate practice of reciting the horrific details of the defendants' crimes before ruling for the G, they are what they are, and Justice Thomas is certainly not the first to do so in his opinions.

So, while I'm not particularly invested in this decision, and if anything I think in capital cases defendants ought to get "good" bites at the apple, this is by no means a crazy or horrific outcome.
 
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