Legal Analysts Blast Supreme Court Ruling Denying Prisoners Who Were Incompetently Represented in State Courts Access to Federal Courts to Prove Innocence, Constitutional Violations

In an opin­ion legal experts have blast­ed as ​“night­mar­ish” and ​“an abom­i­na­tion,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penal­ty cas­es that 1990s amend­ments to the fed­er­al habeas cor­pus law per­mit state pris­on­ers who were pro­vid­ed inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion at tri­al and in post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings to argue that their coun­sel were inef­fec­tive but bar them from pre­sent­ing evi­dence of their inef­fec­tive­ness that com­pe­tent lawyers had dis­cov­ered once the case had reached federal court. 

Barry Jones’ state court lawyers had failed to inves­ti­gate avail­able evi­dence that he was inno­cent and David Martinez Ramirez’s state court lawyers had failed to inves­ti­gate evi­dence of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty that could have led a jury to spare his life. Having failed to inves­ti­gate, nei­ther set of lawyers pre­sent­ed the evi­dence to state courts. In a May 23, 2022 rul­ing in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, Justice Clarence Thomas declared for the six con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers of the Court that nei­ther man was enti­tled to fed­er­al review of the evi­dence that they had been uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly con­vict­ed and con­demned as a result of their lawyers’ ineffectiveness.

In the 2012 case of Martinez v. Ryan and one year lat­er in Trevino v. Thaler, the Court had ruled that pris­on­ers were excused from the habeas cor­pus require­ment of first rais­ing inef­fec­tive assis­tance of coun­sel claims in state court if their fail­ure to do so result­ed from being pro­vid­ed a sec­ond inef­fec­tive lawyer in state post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings. But, Thomas wrote, under 1990s amend­ments to the fed­er­al habeas cor­pus statute, ​“a fed­er­al habeas court may not con­duct an evi­den­tiary hear­ing or oth­er­wise con­sid­er evi­dence beyond the state-court record based on inef­fec­tive assis­tance of state post­con­vic­tion coun­sel.” Thomas called fed­er­al judi­cial inter­ven­tion to over­turn a state prisoner’s con­vic­tion and sen­tence an ​“intru[sion] on state sov­er­eign­ty … [that] over­rides the State’s sov­er­eign pow­er to enforce soci­etal norms through criminal law.” 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing dis­sent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. She described the deci­sion ​“per­verse” and ​“illog­i­cal,” writ­ing that it ​“evis­cer­ates” con­trol­ling case prece­dent and ​“mis­char­ac­ter­izes” oth­er deci­sions of the Court. ​“The Court,” she wrote, ​“arro­gates pow­er from Congress[,] … improp­er­ly recon­fig­ures the bal­ance Congress struck in the [habeas amend­ments] between state inter­ests and indi­vid­ual con­sti­tu­tion­al rights,” and ​“gives short shrift to the egre­gious break­downs of the adver­sar­i­al sys­tem that occurred in these cas­es, break­downs of the type that fed­er­al habeas review exists to correct.”

University of Michigan law pro­fes­sor Leah Litman described the deci­sion as a Catch-22: ​“you can have a fed­er­al court hear the claim, you just can’t present any evi­dence to sup­port [it],” she said. University of Texas law pro­fes­sor Lee Kovarsky, an expert on habeas cor­pus law and the death penal­ty, called the opin­ion an ​“abom­i­na­tion.”

Innocence Project exec­u­tive direc­tor Christina Swarns said ““The opin­ion leaves inno­cent peo­ple in the night­mar­ish posi­tion of hav­ing no court to go to for justice.”

Jones was sen­tenced to death on charges that he mur­dered his girlfriend’s four-year-old daugh­ter. He was rep­re­sent­ed at tri­al and in state post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings by court-appoint­ed lawyers who failed to inves­ti­gate avail­able med­ical evi­dence that that could have proven that the child could not have sus­tained the injuries that killed her at a time in which she was in Jones’ care. 

The fed­er­al dis­trict court grant­ed Jones a hear­ing at which his fed­er­al laws demon­strat­ed that this evi­dence was read­i­ly avail­able if either of his pri­or lawyers had both­ered to look for it and that nei­ther lawyer had a rea­son­able basis for fail­ing to inves­ti­gate Jones’ inno­cence. Following Martinez, the dis­trict court found that post-con­vic­tion counsel’s neg­li­gent fail­ure to raise the issue of tri­al counsel’s inef­fec­tive­ness excused Jones’ fail­ure to present the claim in state court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dis­trict court’s rul­ing, and the Arizona attor­ney general’s office appealed, argu­ing that the 1994 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act cre­at­ed dif­fer­ent stan­dards for the pre­sen­ta­tion of claims than it did for the pre­sen­ta­tion of evi­dence in sup­port of the claims.

Ramirez was sen­tenced to death for the mur­ders of his girl­friend and her daugh­ter. His court-appoint­ed tri­al coun­sel asked the state court to appoint a psy­chol­o­gist to eval­u­ate Ramirez but she failed to pro­vide the doc­tor with back­ground mate­ri­als con­tain­ing evi­dence sug­gest­ing Ramirez might be intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and failed to devel­op or present mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence relat­ing to Ramirez’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. Despite hav­ing evi­dence of red flags of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, his court-appoint­ed post-con­vic­tion coun­sel did not con­duct any fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion into Ramirez’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty and, with­out any strate­gic rea­son for doing so, failed to argue that counsel’s fail­ure to inves­ti­gate and present evi­dence of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty was ineffective.

Ramirez’s fed­er­al habeas coun­sel inter­viewed avail­able wit­ness­es whom tri­al coun­sel had nev­er spo­ken to and found exten­sive evi­dence sup­port­ing a diag­no­sis of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, Habeas coun­sel also pro­vid­ed the tri­al expert with school records and pri­or IQ scores he had been unaware of at the time of tri­al, which the expert said would have caused him to seek com­pre­hen­sive test­ing for intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The fed­er­al dis­trict court denied Ramirez a hear­ing on tri­al and post-con­vic­tion counsel’s inef­fec­tive­ness, but the Ninth Circuit reversed, lead­ing to Arizona’s appeal in the case.

In a May 24, 2022 com­men­tary in Esquire, Charles Pierce wrote that the Supreme Court’s deci­sion evi­denced ​“dis­re­spect for prece­dent, dis­re­spect for the plain lan­guage of incon­ve­nient parts of the law, unto­ward respect for what this Court believes to be the pre­rog­a­tives of state gov­ern­ments, and a sweet tooth for venge­ful law enforce­ment against cer­tain spe­cif­ic groups of cit­i­zens.” He char­ac­ter­ized the Court’s rea­son­ing as, ​“We must main­tain what appears to be an unjust death sen­tence lest peo­ple begin to ques­tion how our state courts par­cel out unjust death sentences.”

Litman wrote in a May 23 com­men­tary in Slate that the deci­sion ​“makes clear that the court’s con­ser­v­a­tive super­ma­jor­i­ty is hell­bent on smash­ing and grab­bing prece­dent and con­sti­tu­tion­al rights no mat­ter the consequences.” 

Robert Loeb, who rep­re­sent­ed Ramirez and Jones in the Supreme Court, issued a state­ment say­ing that the rul­ing ​“leaves the fun­da­men­tal con­sti­tu­tion­al right to tri­al coun­sel with no effec­tive mech­a­nism for enforce­ment in these cir­cum­stances. … It 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.” 

“The deci­sion mis­reads the fed­er­al statute, pro­duces unten­able results nev­er envi­sioned by Congress, and amounts to an assault on basic fair­ness in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem,” Loeb said. ​“I call on Congress to imme­di­ate­ly fix the prob­lem the court has created today.”