SUPREME COURT: Alabama Man Facing Execution Because Attorneys Left Without Filing Appeal

In one of the first cas­es of the new term, the U.S. Supreme Court on October 4 will hear from attor­neys for death-row inmate Cory Maples of Alabama, whose appeal was reject­ed by low­er courts because his lawyers quit and missed a crit­i­cal fil­ing dead­line in his state appeal. Copies of an Alabama court rul­ing in his case were sent to a vol­un­teer New York law firm han­dling his appeals but were returned unopened to the court because the attor­neys rep­re­sent­ing Maples had left the firm. Maples did not find out about the rul­ing or the fact that his attor­neys had left until the dead­line to file his state appeal had expired. Gregory Garre, Maples’ new attor­ney and for­mer solic­i­tor gen­er­al under President George W. Bush, told the Court in a brief that the case ​“rais­es the shock­ing prospect that a man may be exe­cut­ed with­out any fed­er­al court review of seri­ous con­sti­tu­tion­al claims due to a series of events for which all agree he was blame­less.” Alabama’s Solicitor General, John C. Neiman Jr., replied that, ​“Maples is unques­tion­ably guilty of mur­der­ing two peo­ple, and his con­vic­tion is now 15 years old. He has received some sort of judi­cial review of every claim he has made.” Maples was try­ing to chal­lenge the com­pe­ten­cy of his orig­i­nal tri­al lawyers, who were inex­pe­ri­enced and offered only $1,000 each to pre­pare for his tri­al. They pre­sent­ed only 1 hour of tes­ti­mo­ny in his defense, and told the jury that they ​“may appear to be stum­bling around in the dark.” The case is Maples v. Thomas, No. 10 – 63.

In 2006 in an unre­lat­ed case, the Supreme Court con­sid­ered how hard the gov­ern­ment must try to ensure that notice of a con­se­quen­tial action was actu­al­ly received. The case, Jones v. Flowers, con­sid­ered the sale of a home for unpaid tax­es. According the court rul­ing, if a let­ter is returned unopened, offi­cials must try hard­er to reach the own­er. Writing for the major­i­ty, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, ​“This is espe­cial­ly true when, as here, the sub­ject mat­ter of the let­ter con­cerns such an impor­tant and irre­versible prospect as the loss of a house.”

(R. Barnes, ​“Supreme Court con­fronts case of death row inmate whose lawyers quit his case,” Washington Post, September 29, 2011). See Representation, Arbitrariness, and U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has delayed two recent exe­cu­tions (Troy Davis in Georgia and Manuel Valle in Florida) for many hours, but has yet to explain what issues they were con­sid­er­ing. In two oth­er cas­es from Texas (Duane Buck and Cleve Foster), the Court stopped the exe­cu­tions at the eleventh hour, but has not decid­ed whether to take the cases.