Phoning it in
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While all the hullabaloo surrounding SCOTUS today may have been centered around Baze, the Court also issued a minor, but nevertheless terrifically interesting decision. In Wright v. Van Patten [pdf], the Court wrote, per curiam, that the Circuit Court’s grant of a habeas was improper because the State supreme court’s decision denying the habeas was not contrary to clearly established federal law (which is one of the two grounds on which a valid State conviction can receive federal habeas corpus review).
Mr. Wright sough habeas review in the first place because at his plea hearing, his lawyer phoned it in. Not phoned it in in the colloquial sense (or even the widely used “he was crappy” sense that forms the basis of most habeas petitions), but rather in the literal sense. He appeared for the plea hearing via telephone.
In a state as small as CT, that is unheard of. Perhaps in them larger jurisdikshuns where theys gots lots of open land and such, it may be common practice (what was I going for there? I have no clue). Still, the idea seems very…dirty. If my client is pleading guilty, I want to be there to stand by him - if for nothing else than to offer support. It’s not only my client’s case, it is my case as well and having been through the whole process side by side, I’d rather not end it speaker to ear.
Anyway, the Court reserved for another day the substantive question of whether appearing by telephone is legally adequate (maybe that answers your question, Scott?). This case was reversed on purely procedural grounds.
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I don’t think it’s really accurate to call this a “procedural” reversal. AEDPA is the law, and it provides a substantive limitation on when federal courts can grant habeas relief. Bottom line, there were two Clinton appointed hacks at the Seventh Circuit who botched the case, not once, but twice.
Procedural as in it wasn’t a decision on the merits of his claim. It’s not that they said that being absent during the plea is not ineffective, they just said that it shouldn’t have been heard by the district court because they haven’t expressly said that.
You really could have made your point without the “Clinton hacks” statement.
I agree that you can characterize it as “procedural”, but that doesn’t quite get the job done.
In any event, as for the Clinton hacks comment, well, I’m sure that the GOP has never been bashed here . . . . Bottom line, these two Clinton appointed exemplars of the judicial calling couldn’t make a straightforward application of Musladin to a very similar case (i.e., where there is no controlling Supreme Court caselaw). This is by no means an isolated incident–Clinton judges seem to have a problem with applying AEDPA.
Heck–I was just thinking that the decision might allow me to never have to be in the same room as my least favorite district attorney ever again.
Wishful thinking, I guess.