Legal Commentary

Sotomayor and AEDPA: Blame AEDPA More

By Jeralyn

The New York Times has an article today about Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly imprisoned for 16 years in New York for a rape and murder he didn't commit.

His habeas petition was filed four days late due to a mistake by his lawyer and Judge Sonia Sotomayor was one of the Second Circuit judges who ruled against him.

Ms. Sotomayor, along with the other judge on the panel, ruled that the lawyer’s mistake did not “rise to the level of an extraordinary
circumstance” that would compel them to forgive the delay. There was no need to look at the evidence that Mr. Deskovic insisted would
affirm his innocence, they said.

While Sotomayor, in my view, should have taken a more empathetic and real-world view and not insisted on putting procedure over innocence, given that the lawyer did have an explanation (the court clerk had given him the wrong due date), and while penalizing a defendant for a mistake by counsel sucks in general, the major culprit here as we've written many times is AEDPA and the 1 year filing deadline on habeas claims: [More...]

Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, habeas corpus petitions must be submitted no more than a year after a conviction becomes final or, as the courts later determined, no more than a year from the act’s implementation if the conviction became final before that. Mr. Deskovic was convicted in 1990. He had until April 24, 1997, to turn in his request. It arrived four days after that.

In court papers, the lawyer who drafted the petition said that a clerk had provided the wrong deadline. Ms. Sotomayor and her colleague, Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, ruled that the “alleged reliance of Deskovic’s attorney on verbal misinformation from the court clerk” amounted essentially to neglect.

There are plenty of decisions by Judge Sotomayor that are not favorable to the defense. In many, they are not an expression of her personal views, but narrowly tailored to the law and circumstances of the particular case.

To those who believe she is an activist judge who will bend or stretch the law to fit her personal views, this case is but another sign that she won't.

The solution: Get rid of AEDPA. More on Deskovic's case in this 2007 New York Times article and reforms needed here. As TChris wrote here, former Westchester prosecutor Jeannine Pirro largely shares the blame for the Deskovic debacle.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 11, 2009 (boomark / email).