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Adam Liptak on Harbison v. Bell

By standdown

The only news coverage that I've found of yesterday's Supreme Court oral argument in Harbison v. Bell is Adam Liptak's, "Weighing Reach of Law in Appeals for Clemency," in today's New York Times.  The oral argument transcript is here.In an unusually testy argument, the Supreme Court on Monday tried to make sense of a federal law that provides lawyers to poor inmates on state death rows when their cases move to federal court. The question for the justices was whether the law also requires the federal government to pay those lawyers to present clemency petitions to governors and other state officials. The Supreme Court has called executive clemency ?the ?fail safe? in our criminal justice system.? But there is no constitutional right to counsel for people seeking mercy...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).