SUPREME COURT RULES AGAINST INMATES
Ruling against two Arizona death row inmates, the Supreme Court on Monday sharply cut back on prisoners’ ability to challenge their convictions in federal court by arguing that their lawyers had been ineffective in state court proceedings.
The 6-3 decision split along ideological lines. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that a federal court considering a habeas corpus petition “may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state-court record based on ineffective assistance of state post-conviction counsel.”
He based his decision on language in a 1996 federal law limiting habeas corpus petitions, on the judicial system’s interest in finality and on state sovereignty.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority “all but overrules two recent precedents that recognized a critical exception to the general rule that federal courts may not consider claims on habeas review that were not raised in state court.”
One of the men, David Ramirez, fatally stabbed his girlfriend, Mary Ann Gortarez, and her 15-yearold daughter, Candie. Ramirez was convicted and sentenced to death in state court. In later proceedings in federal court, his lawyers argued that his trial lawyer had failed to investigate or present evidence about his intellectual and developmental disabilities that might have prompted the jury to show leniency.
The other inmate, Barry Lee Jones, was convicted of causing the death of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray.
Sotomayor wrote that “Jones’ trial counsel failed to undertake even a cursory investigation and, as a result, did not uncover readily available medical evidence that could have shown that Rachel sustained her injuries when she was not in Jones’ care.”
In a pair of decisions about a decade ago — Martinez v. Ryan in 2012 and Trevino v. Thaler in 2013 — the Supreme Court allowed some federal challenges to state convictions to proceed when lawyers in the state courts had been ineffective at trial and in post-conviction challenges.
On Monday, Thomas wrote that those decisions did not contemplate elaborate hearings in federal court to consider new evidence.
“This wholesale re-litigation of Jones’ guilt,” Thomas added, “is plainly not what Martinez envisioned.”
Sotomayor responded that the hearing was required because Jones’ lawyers had been inadequate. “Far from constituting an inappropriate and ‘wholesale re-litigation of Jones’ guilt,’ ” she wrote, “the district court’s hearing was wideranging precisely because the breakdown of the adversarial system in Jones’ case was so egregious.”