New Law Gets Quick Review In High Court Justices To Rule On Limits To Death-Row Appeals
The Supreme Court, acting with what four dissenters called “unseemly haste,” agreed Friday to weigh the constitutionality of a new law intended to speed executions by restricting convicts’ federal appeals.
The order is likely to halt most executions in the United States for at least the next two months.
The court’s five most conservative justices, who have voted to limit appeals in earlier cases, took the unusual step of granting accelerated review to a Georgia death-row prisoner who challenged a measure signed into law by President Clinton only nine days earlier.
Legal experts cautioned that it would be wrong to presume that all five - Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor - will vote together to uphold the new appeal restrictions.
It is possible that O’Connor, who holds the balance of power in such cases, could decide that Congress exceeded its powers in enacting the new measure, said American University law Professor Ira Robbins, a specialist in death-penalty appeals.
The outcome of the case will be anxiously awaited by many of the 3,061 convicted prisoners on death row in 38 states with capital-punishment statutes, and the families of the victims they were convicted of murdering.
“But this case will not end all the questions,” said Richard Deiter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. “There will be other challenges to this legislation.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, called the court’s expedited review “unnecessary and profoundly unwise.”
Consideration of the weighty constitutional questions involved “should be undertaken with the utmost deliberation, rather than unseemly haste,” Stevens declared.
Sweeping those objections aside, the justices set oral argument for June 3. They are expected to rule before July 4 in the case of Ellis Wayne Felker, who was convicted 13 years ago of the brutal rape and murder of a 19-year-old college student south of Macon, Ga.
Felker, 48, was scheduled to be executed Thursday night at a state prison in Jackson, Ga., but the justices granted a delay so they could review his lawyers’ constitutional attack on the appeals provisions of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1966.
The act limits appeals by setting time limits for filings and rulings, curbing repetitive petitions and toughening standards for review.
One provision bars a convicted state defendant from beginning a second round of federal appeals without authorization from a three-judge appellate panel. An inmate who is turned down has no appeal.
The key constitutional issues before the justices are whether the new law unconstitutionally limits the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court or suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
The writ, a means of bringing prisoners before federal judges to hear complaints of injustice, may be suspended only during rebellions or invasions when “the public safety may require it,” the Constitution states.
Felker’s lawyers, Stephen C. Bayliss and M. Elizabeth Wells of Atlanta, contend that Congress invaded the constitutional territory of the courts and assured inconsistent results by panels throughout the nation. As a result, they said, “the death penalty will strike like lightning.”
Supporters of limits on habeas argue that death-penalty appeals procedures amount to a killers’ loophole, often enabling convicted murderers to drag out their cases for 10 years or more.
To opponents, tightened appeals procedures increase the possibility that innocent people will be put to death. In recent years, federal judges have reversed convictions, sentences or both in nearly 40 percent of all death-penalty cases brought before them on habeas corpus writs.