In August, state court chief justices from around the country went on record opposing the bill at their annual conference.
The Justice Project has a page devoted to this legislation. On November 10, a second hearing was held on the House version, HR 3035 (pdf), before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
Now it's the Senate Judiciary Committee's turn. There's still time to urge Senators to kill it. If you live in one of these states, you have a Senator on the Judiciary Committee: CA, DE, IL, KS, MA, NY, OH, PA, SC, VT, WI.
Please ask them to oppose this short-sighted legislation and stand up for the great writ of habeas corpus. You can send a fax from this action page.
Friday and the weekend would be great times to send the fax, as the Senators will be out for Veterans Day. Let them come back to a pile of faxes from constituents telling them not to tinker with the great writ of habeas corpus.
The Supreme Court said in Rasul v. Bush,
The statute traces its ancestry to the first grant of federal court jurisdiction: Section 14 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized federal courts to issue the writ of habeas corpus to prisoners “in custody, under or by colour of the authority of the United States, or committed for trial before some court of the same.” Act of Sept. 24, 1789, ch. 20, §14, 1 Stat. 82.
In 1867, Congress extended the protections of the writ to “all cases where any person may be restrained of his or her liberty in violation of the constitution, or of any treaty or law of the United States.”
...The writ appeared in English law several centuries ago, became “an integral part of our common-law heritage” by the time the Colonies achieved independence, Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 485 (1973), and received explicit recognition in the Constitution, which forbids suspension of “[t]he Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus … unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it,” Art. I, §9, cl. 2.
...[a]t its historical core, the writ of habeas corpus has served as a means of reviewing the legality of Executive detention, and it is in that context that its protections have been strongest.”
....The historic purpose of the writ has been to relieve detention by executive authorities without judicial trial...“Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.” ....
Here is a partial list of innocent people on death row granted relief in federal court who would have been executed if the Streamlined Procedures Act had been enacted.
Here's a partial list of cases of egregious prosecutorial misconduct and other injustices that would have gone unredressed if the Streamlined Procedures Act were in effect.
As Barry Scheck testified at the first Senate hearing on the bill:
If this bill passes, it will dramatically increase the risk that innocent people will be executed or imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, and that the true perpetrators of those crimes will never be brought to justice.
One last statement to bring the point home, from the epilogue of the 1995 opinion of U.S. District Court Judge Frank Seayto setting aside the conviction and death sentence of Ron Williamson:
While considering my decision in this case I told a friend, a layman, I believed the facts and law dictated that I must grant a new trial to a defendant who had been convicted and sentenced to death. My friend asked, "Is he a murderer?" I replied simply, "We won't know until he receives a fair trial."
God help us, if ever in this great country we turn our heads while people who have not had fair trials are executed. That almost happened in this case. Accordingly, the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall issue...
