Raistlin

So I'm writing a federal habeas corpus brief for a pro bono client of my research professor, claiming ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Right now my job is basically to pick apart everything the state court did in denying our state-level habeas claim for ineffective assistance to try and persuade the federal court just how horrifyingly irrational the state court's decision was. I'm given pretty wide leeway to be as blunt as I need to, and some of things I write would not be out of place in a heated EoEO debate thread. For example:

One of the claims has to do with phone records evidence which, if fully utilized at trial, could have changed the entire trial -- as it showed that the victim's phone was answered by a person hours after the prosecutor claimed she died (which the trial counsel never discovered). The state habeas court dismissed the phone records that showed the call was answered by a person and not the voicemail as an "anomaly," for a couple of reasons (all of this is public record). Here's the first reason as I summarized it in my brief:

The first of the “unexplained anomalies" was that [third party] had dialed [victim's] number one minute before call 193 and was forwarded to the voice mail system, and “the records custodian [for the phone company] did not address whether a call coming in so soon after the voice mail system was activated might affect the systems [sic] ability to pick up the second incoming call.”

To which I reply:

The records custodian also did not address whether a full moon could have affected the voicemail system’s ability to pick up the second call.

My professor's response to that was simply "that's hilarious."

Unfortunately, we have approximately a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning this case, and that is because the US's postconviction relief system is so smurfed up. If a defendant is screwed over at trial, then that is too smurfing bad for him, because all those presumptions of innocence vanish. First off, there's no constitutional right to counsel for habeas proceedings, so most prisoners are left to file for and represent themselves. Second, there are so many hurdles in the way of overturning a conviction, from statutory barriers for a federal court to even hear the case to judicial fictions such as "harmless error," where a court can uphold a conviction despite constitutional error if that error would not have affected the verdict. But the "harmless error" rule is applied well beyond that, to uphold convictions in basically all cases where there is any evidence remaining against the prisoner, regardless of how significant the constitutional violation was. A book I read by the Innocence Project founder called the harmless error doctrine something like the lie that the criminal justice system tells itself so that all involved can sleep at night. And it's true.

But we'll continue to fight the good fight, and by that I mean that I'll continue to mock a state supreme court. That "full moon" line damn well better make it in the final draft.