A recent Philadelphia Inquirer editorial criticized the proposed “Streamlined Procedures Act,” federal legislation that would deny or sharply restrict the reach of federal judges in hearing habeas-corpus claims from those on death row. Noting that the measure would increase the possibility of executing an innocent person, the editorial stated:
Amid Washington lawmakers’ latest drive to further restrict the appeals of (capital) defendants, they need to recognize what could be at risk with their tough-on-crime crackdown - innocent lives.
In both Senate and House versions, the innocently titled Streamlined Procedures Act amounts to an unconscionable assault on federal court oversight of the fairness of criminal trials in the state courts.
The Republican-sponsored measure would deny or sharply restrict the reach of federal judges in hearing habeas-corpus claims from convicts. These claims range from whether adequate legal counsel was provided to indigent (and often minority) defendants, on up to whether an innocent person may have been convicted wrongly.
In death-row cases, the stakes are as high as they come. In other criminal matters, the federal judiciary’s policing of such cases assures that our criminal justice system is truly just.
Strict limits on such appeals were already imposed in 1996 under a post-Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton-era antiterrorism law - and there’s no good reason to tighten them further.
At a recent Senate hearing, proponents argued unimpressively that the appeals delayed “closure” for crime victims, while running up government legal bills.
Isn’t the cost of responding to appeals simply the price of successful anticrime efforts that have put 2.1 million people behind bars? Lock up the bad guys, by all means, but don’t turn around and scrimp on fairness.
The impact of lengthy appeals on crime victims cannot be ignored. But there is a psychological toll, too, on convicts sitting behind bars who know they are innocent, some of them on death row.
There have been dozens of people exonerated while awaiting execution in recent years, often after years of painstaking appeals and probing of their claims of innocence. What if these inmates had not succeeded in their appeals in time?
Surely advocates of limiting convicts’ federal appeals don’t mean to respond to the troubling fact of death-row exonerations by strapping the possibly innocent to a gurney sooner.
Isn’t it odd how some in Congress - mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too - regard the federal courts as the best venue for class-action lawsuits involving consumer-product safety, environmental pollution and civil rights. Yet they don’t want to bother the same highly regarded federal bench with cases concerning the fundamental rights of life and liberty?
A system of justice streamlined to the degree proposed under this measure would not be justice at all.
(Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 2005) See Innocence, Representation, Recent Legislative Activities.
