Steve Lash, The Daily Record Newswire
Saying the justice system should favor substance over form, a federal judge has called for changes in U.S. to ensure long-held convicts can seek new trials based on evidence of actual innocence.
“We are now sitting in a world where claims of actual innocence have to be taken more seriously,” said Diane P. Wood, chief judge of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “Procedure can’t be the ultimate goal.”
Many longtime prisoners have been exonerated through DNA tests unavailable at the time of their trials, Wood said last week in a speech at the Baltimore Law Library.
She also noted an increase in state laws that give convicts a right to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence pointing toward their actual innocence.
Federal law, by contrast, restricts access to U.S. courts to convicts who — having exhausted their appeals — can show that their convictions “involved an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law [or were] based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented,” Wood said, quoting from the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which governs post-conviction relief in federal courts.
“It’s a very, very high bar,” said Wood, whom then-President Bill Clinton appointed to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit in 1995. “Not many things are ‘unreasonable.’”
Under AEDPA, convicts must essentially show that their trial judges had “taken leave of their senses” in failing to act reasonably, she said.
Under Supreme Court precedent, a claim of actual innocence can serve as “a gateway through which a [convict] may pass … a procedural bar.” However, the court added in its 2013 McQuiggin v. Perkins decision that “tenable actual innocence gateway pleas are rare.”
A convict must persuade the district court judge that “in light of the new evidence, no juror, acting reasonably, would have voted to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the court’s 5-4 decision.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the dissenters, said procedure — such as AEDPA’s one-year deadline for filing petitions — trumps claims of actual innocence.
“Never before have we applied the [actual innocence] exception to circumvent a statutory bar to relief,” Scalia wrote. “Where Congress has erected a constitutionally valid barrier to habeas relief, a court cannot decline to give it effect.”
Wood, however, said the focus should be less on rigid procedure and more on the consideration of evidence pointing toward innocence.
“In the world of 2014, it is not hard to imagine that someone might discover video footage from one of the countless cameras that dot our cites that would resolve a long-simmering question about culpability,” said Wood, who was widely reported to have been of President Barack Obama’s short list for Supreme Court vacancies in 2009 and 2010. “The data and meta-data created every day by smart phones, tablets and internet browsing would also have been unimaginable at the time most of this law was created.”
Obama ultimately appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the high court.
A prisoner’s effort to file a federal habeas corpus petition for a new trial under AEDPA could be called a “charade” and a “fool’s errand,” Wood said.
“Habeas corpus, in a word, promises too much, delivers too little and reflects a questionable set of priorities,” she said. “We should find a way to make actual innocence a primary concern throughout our criminal justice system, even in the last-chance proceedings we call habeas corpus.”
