I’ve got a question for any of our lawyers/para-legals/legal groupies. (Not about a real live case, but in connexion with a class I’ll be teaching in a few weeks, so no need for disclaimers about not being my lawyer, &tc.)
What’s the current state of federal habeas review of state court convictions? I know that after Fay v. Noia, its use expanded greatly, but that there were subsequently noises made to restrict its use, both by some Supreme Court judges and by some Congresscritters.
What’s the current status? Did Congress pass any amendments to the USC provisions restricting the use of habeas? Did Rehnquist C.J./Scalia/Thomas manage anything more than fulminating in dissents? Is the “great writ” still as useful a remedy for persons convicted in state courts?
And, a related question on the civil side: how often does a federal court issue a constitutional injunction to a state court? Is that at all common in some areas, such as civil rights litigation?
Thanks very much. (If anyone wants info on the Canadian court system, I’d be pleased to reciprocate!)
This is way out of my area and I’m not going to comment in great depth, but federal habeus was greatly restricted by The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death-Penalty Act of 1996. (Since this is not the Pit, I’m not going to discuss my own feelings about this law, except to note that it wasn’t particulary effective in stopping terrorism, was it?) The Act put numerical limits on the amount of federal habeus petitions a person could file and, IIRC, made it more difficult to get new evidence of innocence before a federal court, but I don’t know enough about it to comment intelligently.
One anecdote I have to share – when I took Federal Courts (the law school class that deals with habeus in the States) in 1998, my professor said he mentioned to a friend that he was planning to teach habeus law in our class. This led the friend to ask “Why? There’s nothing left of it.”
