Editorials
COMMONWEAL What's the rush? If Horace was correct that the source of justice is the fear of injustice, then American justice is in trouble. When he first refused to commute the death sentence of...
...or that their rights have been abridged by the state...
...If it no longer is, we need to ask why...
...For sure, Coleman had more than his fifteen minutes of prime time, and the governor eventually went to unusual lengths to insure Coleman fairness...
...Under a 1867 federal act, state prisoners can file a petition for a writ of "habeas corpus" in federal court when they believe that they are being held unconstitutionally...
...With 20,000 murders a year, our homicide rate is by far the highest in the industrialized world: 8.4 per 100,000, compared to Germany's 4.2 or Japan's 1.2...
...Last month in Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts are no longer obliged to hear appeals if the evidence presented has not been first aired in state courts...
...Certainly there is national frustration over both high crime rates and the glacial speed with which justice is carried out...
...The American assumption that an innocent person will eventually be spared is based, in part, on the availability of such reviews...
...But how can fact-finding be redundant if, through inadequate counsel, important evidence had not yet even been presented...
...Citizens are fed up, and rightfully so, with the effects of violence...
...Court of Appeals in San Francisco publicly questioned this directive to deny further review...
...second, to delay Coleman's execution "wouldn't be fair to other persons who did not have the same degree of media campaign...
...In his Virginia appeal, Roger Coleman was disqualified from entering new evidence after lawyer newly appointed to his case failed by one day to meet a state deadline for filing...
...Yet as Judge Noonan later wrote (New York Times, April 27), in short-circuiting his court's jurisdiction, the Rehnquist Court forced it to commit what Chief Justice John Marshall once called "treason to the Constitution": a federal court's failure to exercise its jurisdiction in a case properly brought before it...
...In the wake of the mounting number of executions in this country, of the injudicious activism of the Rehnquist Court, and of Noonan's objection, it is not too soon to ask why the Chief Justice is so anxious to "get on with it...
...Frustration with unnecessary delays must be dealt with, but frustration alone, not to mention judicial vindictiveness, can never validate a rush to execution...
...That it eventually took over ten minutes for Harris to die underscored the reasonableness of Noonan's query...
...First, the new evidence presented by Coleman's lawyers did not "prove actual innocence...
...Habeas corpus is an important safety net for those who have no other recourse, particularly indigent prisoners represented at trial by inadequate counsel...
...Justice Byron White wrote for the 5-4 majority that "it is hardly a good use of scarce judicial resources to duplicate fact-finding in federal court merely because a petitioner has negligently failed to take advantage of opportunities in state-court proceedings...
...Before the execution, the Ninth Circuit Court, on which Noonan sits, had been asked to consider whether the use of cyanide gas constituted "cruel and unusual" punishment...
...In real life, lawyers have sometimes used habeas corpus appeals as a delaying tactic in an already protracted judicial process...
...For it is the responsibility of Congress to rewrite habeas corpus legislation, and it alone has the right to do so...
...Under White's ruling, for such new evidence to be heard by a federal court the petitioner will first have to show "cause" as to why the evidence was not entered in the state procedure...
...In this regard, the highest court in the land is currently operating like a locomotive in a downhill plunge...
...But despite the occasional frivolous appeal—what Chief Justice Rehnquist calls too many bites at the apple—deral judges have found constitutional errors (which may not be the same thing as innocence) in more than 40 percent of the death-penalty cases they have reviewed over ;he Commonweal 5 June 1992: 3 last sixteen years...
...In the United States, plausible doubt has usually been sufficient reason to prompt reconsideration in capital cases...
...At the time, the Supreme Court ordered all lower courts to refrain from issuing further stays of execution...
...It suggests that the system has failed to protect justice and that efficiency—or worse, even vengefulness—have become the driving force on the Supreme Court and in the administration of justice in general...
...When he first refused to commute the death sentence of Robert Keith Coleman last month, Virginia's Governor L. Douglas Wilder made two revealing observations...
...Justice, let us remember, is like a train that's nearly always late...
...There are now almost 2,500 prisoners on death row in the thirty-six states that allow execution...
...The Court's ruling in Reyes, however, went even further...
...According to Anthony Lewis (New YorkTimes, May 7), to prove "cause" in such cases is so daunting that "practically no prisoner will ever be able to meet the test...
...Some of the most prominent exponents of this view, in fact, now constitute the majority on the Rehnquist Court...
...4: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...
...Judge John T. Noonan of the U.S...
...That Coleman may have been executed prematurely, or at all, because of inadequate representation is something more than his tough luck...
...And since when, to use the governor's awkward and misleading statement, does a prisoner on death row have to "prove" his innocence before a governor must consider commuting or delaying a sentence...
...But since that time, the Court's decisions have consistently limited the right of prisoners to habeas corpus...
...Still, since when does public concern about a possible injustice invalidate an individual's claim to a judicial hearing...
...To expedite sentencing and punishment, the Rehnquist Court has launched a concerted effort to limit delays and restrict the access of state prisoners to review by federal courts...
...In so doing, the Court was legislating from the bench, an abuse of its power...
...It also overturned a 1966 federal statute that insured state prisoners the right to a federal hearing unless they had deliberately bypassed the state court...
...Consider another instance of the Court's rush to judgment, the case of Robert Alton Harris, executed in the California gas chamber in April...
...A skillfully managed conservative agenda has turned anger over use of court delays into a demand for swifter, if not surer, justice...
...Thus it is wise to consider the poet Yevtushenko's reminder: Justice is like a train that's nearly al ways late...
...The question whether capital punishment is itself unconstitutional was settled in 1976 and reaffirmed by the Rehnquist Court in 1987...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
