Supreme Court prioritizes expedience, not justice, in wrongful convictions

(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided on Monday that people in state prison no longer have a broad constitutional right to present new evidence in federal court to support claims that they weren’t adequately represented at trial or on appeal.

The court’s opinion effectively guts a final safeguard against prosecutorial and judicial error or misconduct. It will leave people who have been wrongfully convicted without a court to turn to for justice, and increases the likelihood that some innocent prisoners will be executed.

The justices ruled 6-3 against Barry Jones and David Ramirez, two men sentenced to death in Arizona for murder, who petitioned to present new evidence in their cases.

Jones’ lawyers didn’t conduct a pretrial investigation, and he has made a credible case that they simply overlooked medical evidence that proves his innocence. Two lower courts and the three dissenting justices agreed that his legal representation wasn’t constitutionally adequate.

Ramirez maintains that he has an intellectual disability that the court wasn’t made aware of -- an argument supported by his trial lawyer and court-appointed psychologist -- that makes him ineligible for capital punishment.

The opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas gives Arizona approval to proceed with the executions of the two men. The ruling also narrows the scope of Sixth Amendment rights: It means federal courts can still hear inadequate legal representation claims but can’t consider evidence that wasn’t already presented in earlier proceedings.

Ineffective-assistance claims virtually always require the presentation of evidence that isn’t already in the record, according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent and an amicus brief by government offices that represent death-row inmates in federal proceedings in about 18 states. (So-called “habeas” proceedings come after an appeal and are intended to ensure prisoners were sentenced in compliance with the Constitution.)

In September last year, for example, a Texas man who had been on death row since 2003 had his conviction overturned because of new evidence of egregious misconduct in his case. The conflict-of-interest in Clinton Young’s case was discovered only by happenstance, and he came within days of execution in 2017 -- after his federal habeas petition was denied.

Under Thomas’ ruling on Monday, federal courts will be compelled in many instances to simply disregard similar evidence of innocence or inadequate representation if it wasn't presented during trial or appeal, including for charges much less serious than capital murder.

Thomas' opinion ignores the evidence of innocence in Jones' case, numerous documented wrongful convictions around the country, including in death penalty cases, and the research suggesting there are probably even more innocent people in jail than we might think.

The National Registry of Exonerations lists more than 815 exonerations since 1989 involving “inadequate legal defense," including more than 44 people who were sentenced to death.

The decision also overlooks the crisis of inadequate representation in public defense, and that successful habeas petitions are already exceedingly rare: federal courts in Pennsylvania, Florida and South Carolina granted habeas relief in just 38 petitions between 2012 and 2021 – and only admitted evidence in 19, according to an amicus brief filed by a group of academics.

Monday's opinion centered on an interpretation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which severely curtailed post-conviction petitions.

To be sure, post-conviction appeals involve procedures that may be obscure to non-lawyers. And some of the formal legal issues in the Ramirez case, like exhaustion, or “federal-state comity,” might seem complex.

But the conservative majority’s legal analysis isn’t particularly complicated, in any real sense.

It amounts to a conclusory determination that the government efficiency achieved by restricting prisoners’ ability to challenge convictions is preferable to strengthening judicial integrity by continuing to allow appeals in multiple forums.

The core of the majority’s reasoning is that a “federal order to retry or release a state prisoner overrides the State’s sovereign power to enforce ‘societal norms through criminal law’” and “imposes significant costs” - including undermining respect for the “finality” of state-court judgments.

The ruling demonstrates an indifference to wrongful convictions and unwillingness to examine the mistakes of law enforcement and judicial officers. Even the central holding - that federal re-hearings undermine state power – is derived from a 1998 case, Calderon v. Thompson, that resulted in the execution of a man many believe was probably innocent.

Stephen Reinhardt, a former 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who heard the case against Thomas Thompson, said in a 1999 lecture that Thompson was “likely innocent” and a former prosecutor who authored the California law that led to his execution later became a death penalty abolitionist because he believed his work “resulted in the death of an innocent person," according to a Los Angeles Times interview in July 2011.

Underneath the simplistic legal analysis in Monday's case, the justices' ruling is apparently animated by the same concerns raised by mostly Republican politicians and the Clinton White House while pushing to enact the Effective Death Penalty Act – what Sotomayor described as a “single-minded focus on finality.”

The statute was “drafted, enacted, and signed in an atmosphere of anger and fear,” following the heinous Oklahoma City bombing, Bryan Stevenson, law professor at New York University School of Law, wrote in a 2002 law review article.

Conservative lawmakers were primarily concerned with swift punishment as retribution and as deterrent – putting people convicted of horrible crimes to death as soon as possible, according to Stevenson and additional research by Judith Ritter, a Widener University Delaware Law School professor. It didn’t matter that the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was a federal prisoner, and the statute largely impacted state prisoners.

The court’s approach to habeas petitions since the 1990s has similarly been “shaped” by “political variables and unexamined assumptions about prisoners and their lawyers,” Stevenson wrote.

“Much of the current shape of habeas corpus law reflects the Supreme Court’s and Congress’s belief that the state courts are adjudicating constitutional issues in capital cases fairly,” Stevenson said.

In all, the conservatives' ruling elevates process over substantive justice, apparently based on nothing more than the unexamined belief that people who get arrested, tried and convicted are probably guilty, and should be swiftly punished. Unfortunately, most Americans already know the reality is often quite different.

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