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: Capital Defense Weekly

weekly email edition

By Karl R. Keys, Esq.

from this week’s edition: Leading off this edition is the Supreme Court’s holding in Harbison v. Bell. The nutshell holding of the case is that federally funded counsel can do  state clemency proceedings. As DPIC notes the “Court determined that the reference to ?proceedings for executive and other clemency? in the federal statute reveals that the law is intended to encompass state clemency proceedings. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, clarified that ?[f]ederal clemency is exclusively executive: Only the President has the power to grant clemency for offenses under federal law. By contrast, the States administer clemency in a variety of ways.? In the dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the federal law in question applies only to federal death row inmates and does not intend to extend representation of state inmates by federally appointed and funded counsel to the state clemency process...continue to full post

Full post as published by Capital Defense Weekly on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).