In the past, I have often railed against what I have seen as the idiocy of the Supreme Court of the United States. Over the past few years, they have engaged in some decisions that made me froth at the mouth. (Let's not discuss Ledbetter v. Goodyear, or even worse, Kelo v. City of New London.)
In an effort to be more upbeat, I am going to ignore discussions of decisions such as the Citizen's United case, allowing unfettered corporate spending during elections, or the detainee pictures issue. Instead, there was at least one case to be happy about, at least from my perspective.
This case I am most happy about, Holland v. Florida, seemed to be the sort of thing that would be obvious to any layperson. An inmate, on death row in Florida, desperately tried to communicate with his lawyer about his case. All attempts to get the lawyer's attention failed. The defendant even went so far as to petition the circuit court directly, only to be told that such an appeal was improper since he was already represented by counsel. The lawyer subsequently missed the filing deadline for the habeas corpus petition.
The question raised before the court was whether the defendant's actions were sufficient to suspend the deadline for submitting habeas review petitions under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. (The deficencies of which are a rant for another day.) The court failed to answer that question, instead saying the circuit court's decision that lawyer negligence was never enough to suspend the tolling of the statute was wrong.
Well, duh. If an inmate does all he can and the lawyer is a blithering idiot, it's the inmate's life on the line, not the lawyer's. Sadly, two justices -- two of the usual suspects, Scalia and Thomas -- dissented, stating that the Court was powerless to make any changes.*
Clients are at the mercy of lawyers. In most cases, it is the lawyers who determine if appeals get filed on time. There are strict statutes of limitations for a reason: without them, the judicial system would grind to a halt, and no one could ever be sure that something in their past would not force them before a court to answer for past actions. (Whether those limits are in fact fair, in any given case, is determined by the particulars of the law. In some cases, like limits on when an appeal may be filed in a capital case, I find unconscionable; in others, such as limitations on when tort actions may be filed, not so much.)
Lawyers given to handling capital cases are occasionally underpaid or incompetent. Until 2000, Alabama attorneys were paid $1000 to defend defendants in capital cases; now they are paid $60 an hour for out of court work and $30 for in court work. While this may seem like a great deal, for a lawyer, whose has office overhead, and whose capital defense work would affect his ability to work on other, more lucrative cases, it is a pittance. Not to mention the costs of investigators to probe into the case and the background of the client to find questionable facts or mitigating circumstances.
To preclude an inmate who has done his desperate best to forward his case is to allow technicalities to trump any notion of justice.
There were other cases whose outcome I applauded, such as the Florida beach ownership case, Stop the Beach v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, (from the viewpoint of someone who believes --- admittedly perhaps socialistically -- that all beach access should be public)** and, more reservedly, the juvenile justice cases (see previous post).
I am looking forward to seeing what the court does next. The term begins October 4. No doubt I will rant about the stupid decisions, but hopefully I will also be able to find time to cheer the good ones.
*There is another rant in here about how some of Scalia's statements in other cases can be construed to imply that there is no constitutional right to prove one's innocence, but again, that's a rant for another day.
** They left the whole judicial takings issue for another day. Given the makeup of the Court, that's a little worrisome, but in any case we don't have to deal with it now.
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