Democrats, stand up for the underdogs: Boldly push forward legislation to end the death penalty nationwide.
The death penalty has long been known to be biased — racist and classist and ableist. According to the ACLU, more than half of those who have been executed in the US have been Black. Those who receive the death penalty also tend to be poor and uneducated. Although there are supposed to be safeguards in place for the mentally challenged, current protections are clearly inadequate.
Yet the US Extreme Court yesterday ignored these systemic flaws to state that issues may not be raised in federal review of death penalty cases that were not raised at the state level — even in cases of ineffectiveness of counsel, when the issue is likely to be the omission of important information by attorneys who failed to raise it at trial and on earlier appeal, which is what made them ineffective! The entire decision is here, if you would like details. In short, legally it has generally been decided that any attorney’s ineffectiveness is his client’s fault! Bolding mine:
As a general matter, attorney error does not constitute cause to excuse procedural default because courts attribute attorneys’ errors to their clients.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous lines of reasoning ever. If clients knew the ins and outs of how best to defend their cases, they would not need attorneys! The presumptive default should be that attorneys’ errors are the attorneys’ fault (duh!), with attorneys who can prove otherwise welcome to proceed to do so. But the cases decided yesterday by the Extreme Court make the situation worse.