Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990 TAG: 9003062056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The action came in two death-penalty cases, both decided by 5-to-4 votes, curtailing the ability of death-row inmates to base their appeals on favorable court rulings that have been issued in other cases since their own convictions became final.
The principle the majority invoked to validate the two death sentences applies beyond the area of capital punishment, and will restrict access to the federal courts for state prison inmates, regardless of the crimes for which they were convicted.
The impact is sharpest in the death penalty area, however, because the decisions mean that states will be free to carry out death sentences that were valid according to the status of the law at the time they were imposed but that could not be imposed today in light of subsequent rulings.
The rulings, one written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and the other by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, concerned petitions for writs of habeas corpus, one of the most complex but significant areas of federal court jurisdiction and one that state law-enforcement officials have long regarded as intrusive.
Habeas corpus is the only means by which federal judges hear constitutional challenges to state-court convictions and sentences, and without it state prisoners are limited to appealing their convictions within their own state courts.
But years often pass between the time that a prisoner exhausts his state court appeals and files a habeas corpus petition. And frequently, intervening federal court decisions have changed the law in ways that can help the inmate's case.
Nevertheless, death penalty specialists say between one-half and two-thirds of all death sentences are eventually overturned as the result of habeas corpus petitions.
At issue Monday was the general question of when a habeas corpus petitioner can derive benefit from intervening developments in the law. What is such a new rule"?
The decisions Monday defined "new rule" in very broad terms, with the result that intervening decisions will very rarely be able to provide the basis for a habeas corpus petition.
As long as the outcome of an intervening decision was not "dictated" by precedent and "was susceptible to debate among reasonable minds," it is a "new rule" that cannot be invoked by a state prisoner, Rehnquist said in one of the decisions, Butler v. McKellar.
Precedents that "inform, or even control or govern" the intervening decision do not keep it from being a new rule if the precedents do not "compel" the decision, Kennedy said in the second case, Saffle v. Parks.
In his brief opinion, Rehnquist stressed that the refusal to permit state prisoners to benefit from later decisions "validates reasonable good-faith interpretations of existing precedents made by state courts even though they are shown to be contrary to later decisions."
Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote dissenting opinions in both cases. In the Butler case, an appeal by a South Carolina man sentenced to death for murdering a convenience store clerk, Brennan said: "Under the guise of fine-tuning the definition `new rule,' the court strips state prisoners of virtually any meaningful federal review of the constitutionality of their incarceration."
As a result of Monday's decision, Brennan said, "a state prisoner can secure habeas relief only by showing that the state court's rejection of the constitutional challenge was so clearly invalid under then-prevailing legal standards that the decision could not be defended by any reasonable jurist. With this requirement, the court has finally succeeded in its thinly veiled crusade to eviscerate Congress' habeas corpus regime."
by CNB