Supreme Court decision makes it tougher for inmates to win release

The Supreme Court in a ruling Monday made it tougher for prison inmates to win release, barring federal courts from holding evidentiary hearings or considering new evidence of claims that their attorneys did not provide them with adequate legal representation after convictions in state court.

All six of the Supreme Court’s conservatives voted in the majority in the case, which related to two Arizona state prison inmates on death row for separate murders. They challenged the legality of their incarcerations.

The court’s three liberal justices all dissented from the majority opinion, which Justice Clarence Thomas wrote.

Thomas’ opinion says that Arizona’s federal district court erred in considering new evidence presented by the inmates, David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones, to support claims that their defense lawyers had given “ineffective assistance of counsel” in post-conviction proceedings.

Thomas said federal courts can only consider evidence already presented in the state court record of the case.

In her blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the majority opinion “perverse” and “illogical.” She said it will have a “devastating outcome” for inmates beyond the two in the case decided Monday.

“The Court understates, or ignores altogether, the gravity of the state systems’ failures
in these two cases,” Sotomayor wrote.

“To put it bluntly: Two men whose trial attorneys did not provide even the bare minimum level of
representation required by the Constitution may be executed because forces outside of their control prevented them from vindicating their constitutional right to counsel. It is hard to imagine a more ‘extreme malfunctio[n]’ … than the prejudicial deprivation of a right that constitutes the ‘foundation for our adversary system,'” she wrote.

Ramirez was convicted of fatally stabbing his girlfriend and her 15-year-old daughter in 1989. Police also found evidence that he had raped the daughter, and Ramirez confessed to doing so, Thomas noted in his opinion.

Ramirez, in his habeas petition, argued that his trial lawyer provided ineffective assistance by failing to perform a complete “mitigation investigation.” It could have obtained evidence that can be used to argue during sentencing that he should not receive the death penalty.

Jones was convicted of fatally beating the 4-year-old daughter of his girlfriend, and of sexually assaulting the child, in 1994.

In his habeas petition in federal court, Jones’ new lawyer alleged that his trial attorney failed to investigate evidence that could have shown that the child sustained the injuries that led to her death while not in his care. The new lawyer also argued that Jones’ original post-conviction attorney, who lacked minimum qualifications for lawyers appointed in capital cases,…