The Withered Writ

The Withered Writ: The commission made 16 recommendations for habeas reform. Six were about providing competent counsel at every stage of challenging a capital conviction and death sentence. (A former Supreme Court law clerk told the commission what he had learned during that experience: “The death penalty frequently results from nothing more than poverty and poor lawyering.”) Other recommendations were intended to speed up the habeas process by adding time constraints, limiting challenges following an appeal of the conviction and sentencing, and narrowing the scope of habeas in most instances to claims that the petitioner was innocent rather than that he suffered a violation of his constitutional rights.