Right-wingers on the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 this month that people who receive ineffective assistance of counsel are not entitled to present new evidence to prove their innocence in federal court.
In a shameful opinion that broke down along ideological lines, the right-wingers on the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 this month that people who receive ineffective assistance of counsel are not entitled to present new evidence to prove their innocence in federal court.
After the decision in— which flies in the face of the court’s recent precedents protecting the Sixth Amendment right to counsel — even people who can demonstrate their innocence could be subjected to the shameful practice of capital punishment. “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,” Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, adding that “the court hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard that right” and “reduces to rubble” many Sixth Amendment constitutional rights.decision are frightening. “When a capital defendant is poorly represented by an appointee of the State, the State gets to defend the unfairly won conviction in federal court and bar the defendant from even showing that crucial evidence was omitted from the trial due to lawyer malfeasance,” appellate habeas defense attorney Chuck Sevilla told. “This obvious Kafkaesque scenario could, and probably will, lead to the execution of the innocent.”In 1994, Barry Lee Jones was charged with murdering his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. The prosecution argued that Rachel died from an injury while in Jones’s care. But Jones’s trial attorney didn’t perform any investigation, which would have uncovered medical evidence that Rachel’s fatal injury could not have progressed as rapidly as the prosecution claimed. This evidence may have demonstrated Rachel was injured when she wasn’t in Jones’s care. Since the jury never heard this evidence, they convicted Jones of murder and the trial judge sentenced him to death. Arizona law didn’t allow Jones to argue on direct appeal that his trial lawyer provided him with ineffective assistance of counsel. The first time he could raise this issue was in a state habeas corpus proceeding, where Jones once again was appointed an incompetent lawyer, whofor appointment in a capital case. The new lawyer also carried out almost no investigation, failing to investigate the ineffective assistance of Jones’s trial attorney. The state habeas lawyer didn’t even allege in the habeas petition that Jones’s trial lawyer was ineffective for failing to investigate the medical evidence. The Arizona courts denied Jones’s habeas petition. Jones filed a petition for habeas corpus in Federal District Court, where he was finally represented by a competent attorney. The District Court held an evidentiary hearing where Jones’s lawyer presented exonerating evidence that could have been offered by his trial counsel and state habeas counsel. After the hearing, the District Court found that Jones’s state habeas lawyer provided ineffective assistance of counsel and therefore Jones could raise the issue for the first time in federal court. The District Court also concluded that there was a “reasonable probability that the jury would not have unanimously convicted [Jones] of any of the counts” if Jones’s trial attorney had “adequately investigated and presented medical and other expert testimony to rebut the State’s theory” of Jones’s guilt. Arizona appealed the District Court’s decision, arguing that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act prevented the District Court from considering new evidence. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s ruling.David Ramirez was convicted of capital murders of his girlfriend and her daughter. During the sentencing phase, the state court appointed a psychologist to conduct a mental health evaluation of Ramirez. But Ramirez’s trial lawyer failed to provide the psychologist with evidence that Ramirez had an intellectual disability which could mitigate against a death sentence and in favor of life in prison without parole. Ramirez was sentenced to death. Like Jones, Ramirez was appointed a lawyer for his state habeas claim. And like Jones, this was the first time Ramirez had an opportunity to claim he had received ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Again, as in Jones’s case, Ramirez’s state habeas attorney didn’t conduct an investigation despite knowing that Ramirez might suffer from intellectual disabilities. Neither did Ramirez’s state habeas attorney argue that trial counsel provided ineffective assistance of counsel by not developing and presenting mitigating evidence. The Arizona courts denied Ramirez’s habeas petition.A Federal District Court appointed the Arizona Federal Public Defender to represent Ramirez in a federal habeas proceeding, citing “concerns regarding the quality” of his prior attorneys. Ramirez argued in his habeas petition that his trial counsel had provided him with ineffective assistance. He submitted evidence from family members, who had never been contacted by Ramirez’s trial lawyer and his state habeas lawyer. This evidence demonstrated that Ramirez ate on the floor growing up and slept on dirty mattresses in places filthy with animal feces; that his mother beat him with electrical cords; and that he had multiple apparent developmental delays, which included “delayed walking, potty training, and speech” and he was unable to engage in basic hygiene or use eating utensils. The court-appointed psychologist who evaluated Ramirez for the sentencing phase of the trial told the habeas court that if the trial attorney had given him Ramirez’s school records and IQ scores, he would have insisted on comprehensive testing. Ramirez’s trial counsel submitted an affidavit saying she wasn’t prepared to handle “the representation of someone as mentally disturbed as … Ramirez.” But the District Court denied Ramirez’s ineffectiveness claim and refused to allow him to present further evidence in the federal habeas proceeding. Arizona conceded that Ramirez’s state habeas lawyer performed deficiently. The Ninth Circuit reversed and directed the District Court to receive evidence to support Ramirez’s ineffectiveness claim, saying he had been “precluded from such development because of his post-conviction counsel’s ineffective representation.”Defendants Who Receive Ineffective Counsel Are Now Trapped in a Catch-22that defendants could argue that they received ineffective assistance of counsel for the first time in federal court. But on May 23, 2022, the court ruled inDefendants who are convicted in state court must first raise constitutional challenges to their convictions in state court. If they don’t, they are in “procedural default” and a federal court cannot review their constitutional claims. In, however, the court held that if a state allows a prisoner to raise a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel for the first time in a state habeas corpus proceeding , the lawyer’s ineffectiveness at the habeas stage constitutes “cause” to excuse the procedural default.
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