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The Status of Fast Track Regulations

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"DOJ reopens public comment on fast-track death penalty habeas procedures," is Marcia Coyle's web-only report for National Law Journal, today.After issuing a final rule in December on how states could opt into fast-track death penalty habeas procedures in federal courts, the U.S. Department of Justice has reopened a public comment period on the new procedures. Chapter 154 of Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 provides procedural benefits in federal habeas corpus review of capital cases to states that go beyond the constitutional requirement of appointing counsel for indigents at trial and on appeal by providing counsel also to capital defendants in state postconviction proceedings. Before a 2005 amendment to Chapter 154, the determination that a state was eligible for the procedural benefits had been left to the federal court of appeals for the circuit in which a state was located...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).