The Senate Judiciary Committee will take up legislation today meant to streamline the death penalty appeals process -- something critics fear could lead to the execution of the wrongly convicted.
Opposition is mounting to the Streamlined Procedures Act introduced in the Senate by Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and in the House by Dan Lungren (R-Gold River). Concerns come not only from death-penalty opponents but from individuals and groups not often thought of as vocal supporters of the rights of criminal defendants.
Among the critics are the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal group that specializes in religious freedom and antiabortion issues; Bob Barr, the conservative Republican former congressman from Georgia; more than 50 former prosecutors; and more than a dozen former federal judges.
The legislation, opponents say, would dramatically restrict federal courts' ability to consider habeas corpus petitions from state prisoners who claim that their constitutional rights have been violated or that they have evidence they are innocent.
Habeas corpus is the centuries-old method of challenging allegedly illegal imprisonments by giving inmates a day in court to assert that a serious error has been made in their case.
Kyl and Lungren introduced virtually identical bills in the Senate and House to remedy "endless delays" between convictions in capital cases and executions.
They say that restrictions Congress imposed in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 are not enough.
Kyl said the number of habeas corpus petitions pending in federal district courts had increased to 23,218 in fiscal year 2003, from 13,359 in fiscal year 1994, citing Administrative Office of the Courts data.
The bill would impose a host of restrictions on an inmate's ability to get a federal court to hear a habeas corpus petition.
A group of former federal judges, in a letter of opposition, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "there are now too many instances to ignore in which innocent people were sentenced to prison, or even to death, and it took years for the evidence of their innocence to come to light."
Kyl said the bill had an exception that would enable innocent people to obtain relief from a wrongful conviction.
But the former judges -- including William H. Webster and William S. Sessions, both of whom served as directors of the FBI in Republican administrations -- countered that "the language of the exception is so narrow that it will cover virtually no one."
