Some stuff I've seen:
A preview of the upcoming Supreme Court arguments from the North Country Gazette.
Speaking of Lafler v. Cooper, the Buffalo News had an article about the arrest of a man who obtained habeas relief in WDNY back in 2006 based on IAC during plea negotiations in a drunk driving prosecution in which he had struck and killed some people while drunk driving. He was arrested for leaving the scene of a car accident that injured three people.
An article from Erwin Chemerinsky about the need for empathy on the Supreme Court. One situation he points to is what happened in Maples.
More Troy Davis/anti-AEDPA coverage here. The article indicates that, back in 2009, Rep. Hank Johnson from Georgia introduced legislation called the Effective Death Penalty Appeals Act (I guess it would be called "EDPAA," pronounced as a word the same as "AEDPA"). It received 17 co-sponsors, was referred to a sub-committee, but never obtained a hearing. Here's the text of the statute. The only change it would have made would have allowed a court to grant habeas relief in capital cases if petitioner could show that he was innocent. Significant, but does not really address most of the complaints about the AEDPA. Or at least it does not address my complaints.
Blood boiling time: two lawyers, one of whom served in the Reagan and Bush I Justice Departments, give a full-throated endorsement of the death penalty in response to the criticism from people upset over the Troy Davis case. In their mind, the only problem with the death penalty in this country is that people are wasting everyone's time complaining about it. I wish that was an unfair oversimplification of their position, but it really isn't. A reader responds, what if the person executed is innocent? Their response (and I really am not making an unfair oversimplification here) -- too bad. They say that you can't have "perfect justice, which is impossible. But the administration of the death penalty in the United States is as close to perfect as it gets." A footnote adds that three times a day, the writers remove their heads from the sand in order to eat.
Comments