Why Did SCOTUS Sit on 2 Capital Cases for a Year?

Congress enacted the Crime Victims Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. §3771, in 2004, providing among other rights for victims of federal offenses "the right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay." Two years later, Congress amended §3771 to extend its protection to federal habeas corpus proceedings in state criminal cases. It did not occur to Congress to protect victims from unreasonable delay by the United States Supreme Court on certiorari review of state cases because that had never been a problem.

It is now.

Wood v. Oklahoma, No. 17-6891, and Jones v. Oklahoma, No. 17-6943, involve the same issue the Supreme Court appropriately put to rest over 30 years ago in McCleskey v. Kemp. See my 2012 law review article for details. Now they want to dredge it back up with a new study. Note that this is a claim that has nothing whatever to do with whether they committed the crimes and only a very remote relation to whether death is a just and proportionate penalty for their conduct. The Oklahoma courts said, correctly, that such a claim could not be raised for the first time in a successive post-conviction petition -- Wood's third and Jones's second. Such petitions should be reserved for true miscarriages of justices.

The State filed its brief in opposition in Wood on January 29, 2018. The case was distributed for conference twenty-six times. This extraordinary number of relists has been the subject of considerable speculation. What on earth could possibly be taking so long? It does not take a year to say "Yes, we will hear it" or "No, we will not." It couldn't be that the Court was going to summarily reverse and was writing a per curiam opinion. The Court does not summarily reverse a decision when it rests on a valid state procedural ground and especially when deciding the merits in the petitioner's favor would require overruling a landmark precedent.

So the only possibility that seemed to be left was that one or more Justices were writing opinion concurring or dissenting from denial of certiorari. But for nearly a year?

Today, the Court denied certiorari without comment and with no separate opinions. What?! They held up long-overdue justice for a year for nothing?

This is conduct unbecoming the high court, or any court for that matter. Victims deserve more respect, even if the statute does not specifically apply to this proceeding.

Why Did SCOTUS Sit on 2 Capital Cases for a Year? curated from Crime and Consequences Blog