One of the things that annoys judicial conservatives greatly is the time it takes to carry out the death penalty. Too many condemned prisoners, they believe, put off the executioner for years by filing appeal after appeal.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist often has deplored the burden of paperwork that death row appeals place on federal judges, and has yearned openly for more “efficiency” in the process.
Congress is debating whether to restrict habeas corpus proceedings-the right of prisoners to appeal their convictions to a federal court on the grounds that constitutional error has been committed in their state court trials. But habeas corpus is the system’s safety valve and the condemned person’s last cry for justice.
Forty-eight times in the last 20 years, prisoners sentenced to death have been found to be innocent, many of them after habeas corpus appeals. That’s 48 times the system almost made a fatal and irreversible mistake. The racial and class inequities of the death penalty are well documented: White, middle-class murderers get prison terms. Poor black ones get death.
Habeas corpus provides a last dispassionate review of the evidence and the fairness of a trial. Congress should be in no hurry to restrict it.
