Habeas Corpus

IT'S TOO BAD that Mumia Abu-Jamal has become an international poster boy for the ills of America's system of criminal justice. Because for all the injustices that may have marred his case, he could be guilty of murder.So, many won't care that his case is a reminder of the need for a legal mechanism to insure that the government follows the law. That mechanism, habeas corpus, is falling victim to the tangled politics of the death penalty in America.New-trial bid deniedThe Constitution protects not only the innocent but the guilty from being jailed illegally.

A federal judge has fired the attorney handling the appeal of Maryland death row inmate Tyrone Delano Gilliam, saying the defense lawyer paid too much attention to the execution of the late John F. Thanos and not enough to his client.U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson Wednesday denied the public defender's motion to appoint Jerome H. "Jay" Nickerson of Rockville to handle Gilliam's appeal in federal court. Jay Nickerson, who is not related to the judge, had handled the appeal in Maryland courts.

The document showing President Abraham Lincoln's personal intervention in a Baltimore treason case during the Civil War was not the only nugget archivist Kellee Green Blake mined from 10 boxes crammed with Baltimore federal court records of the period.Ms. Blake found a record of Maryland's most famous case of the time, the treason indictment of John Merryman of Hayfields, whose arrest in May 1861 provoked a constitutional struggle between Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney and President Lincoln over the suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

Fearing that convicted killer John Frederick Thanos could be executed immediately if Maryland's highest court rules that he should die, a federal public defender asked a U.S. District Court judge yesterday to issue a federal stay of execution.But when a Maryland prosecutor promised that the state would not execute Thanos until at least 24 hours after the Maryland Court of Appeals rules, U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg declined to issue the stay. He told the lawyers to return Tuesday morning to discuss the issue.

WASHINGTON -- Ensnarled in presidential election politics, a major crime bill died last year as Republicans and Democrats refused to compromise on such difficult issues as capital punishment, death row appeals and gun control.This year was supposed to be different. With Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress, many hoped the impasse would break."It's time we put aside the divisions of party and philosophy," President Clinton pleaded last month in a ceremony announcing his commitment to push for the same crime bill that failed in 1992.

"I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor may well focus on the [abortion] issue before us today."-- Justice Harry Blackmun With those words the author of Roe vs. Wade turned to the future and pointed to two paths leading to ideological worlds far apart. Justice Blackmun's separate opinion last week in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey intimated that the reign of Roe may depend more on constitutional politics than on constitutional law. It was as if he were preparing to pass the torch, not to black-robed justices but rather to gray-suited senators.

WASHINGTON -- Overturning a precedent of the Warren Court era, the Supreme Court effectively has shut the door on an important route of federal court appeals for state prison inmates.By a 5 to 4 vote, the court ruled yesterday that federal courts are no longer obliged to grant a hearing on a state prisoner's challenge to his conviction, even if the prisoner can show that his lawyer had not properly presented crucial facts of the case in a state-court appeal.Until yesterday, federal courts handling such challenges through habeas corpus petitions from state inmates were required to hold a hearing to evaluate evidence if facts central to the case had not been presented adequately to the state courts.

When one of our Founding Fathers suggested in the Constitutional Convention that a Bill of Rights be drawn up, the state delegations unanimously rejected the idea. So the document was drawn up without one, and the Bill of Rights added only later. We celebrate its bicentennial Sunday. There were several reasons for this apparent flip-flop.In the first place, most of the states in 1787 had bills of rights already. When Elbridge Gerry proposed that a federal version be drafted, Roger Sherman declared this was unnecessary because the state bill of rights were sufficient.

FOR DECADES, liberal and conservative students of the Supreme Court have criticized its remoteness from the day-to-day realities of how the law is practiced. They are right. Examples of the court's insularity are not hard to find.On June 24, in Coleman vs. Thompson, the court held that a prisoner sentenced to death was barred from presenting his federal habeas corpus claim because his lawyer was three days late in filing a notice of appeal. The court had no trouble concluding that a client should be held accountable for his lawyer's failings.

AMERICANS are brought up believing that federal courts are our ultimate protectors against the abuse of state power. The innocent man, convicted in violation of the Constitution, can look to those judges to vindicate his rights.That belief -- that premise of our system -- is now in the balance. It will no longer be valid if a provision in the Senate crime bill, put there at President Bush's urging, becomes law.The provision masquerades as a reform of a historic jurisdiction of the federal court: the right to consider habeas corpus petitions from state prisoners challenging the constitutionality of their convictions.