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HABEAS CORPUS: CHALLENGING A WRONGFUL CRIMINAL CONVICTION
Connecticut Habeas Corpus Attorneys
Habeas Corpus: a unique area of legal practice
I am proud to say that from the first days of my career as a lawyer- beginning with my work as a law clerk for a Federal District Judge drafting Habeas opinions-I have dedicated my practice in some part to habeas matters.
Few competent lawyers practice in this intricate corner of the judicial world; yet there is no legal tool with a more noble history and tradition in realizing the civil rights of citizens imprisoned by the State.
Habeas Corpus: why it is important
We live in perilous times.
In times of war or national political paranoia any citizen brave enough to raise a contrary public view is at risk of government detention without trial, or conviction without just cause after trial by an unchecked prosecutorial authority with power to corrupt witnesses and process.
This is no paranoid fantasy: one need only consider the Japanese-American interment during World War II; the decades of post-civil war white supremacist southern juries and their routine convictions of black defendants innocent of any crime; the countless numbers of innocent citizens (and non-citizens) wrongly deemed “terrorist” and imprisoned for prolonged periods without benefit of trial, victimized by the government’s post “9-11" degradation of our system of criminal justice; and the seemingly daily news accounts of the release of wrongful convicted citizens who, with the advent of DNA technology, have been shown to be wrongfully imprisoned for shockingly long periods of time by juries presented with cases by overzealous unethical government prosecutors and incompetent defense counsel.
Let us be clear: we reside in a Post-New Deal, national security State run by an increasingly omnipotent federal government with the power to investigate, prosecute, and convict ordinary citizens who have not committed a clearly defined crime by coercion of witnesses and manipulation of juries. As set forth in Harvey Silvergate’s brilliant book Three Felonies A Day a wide variety of innocuous behaviors have been criminalized by an overzealous Justice Department; a compliant judiciary; and a system of amorphous federal statutes that fail to provide fair notice of conduct deemed criminal. The result is a citizenry at constant risk of imprisonment at the whim of government officials with complete discretion to interpret and prosecute the law as they see fit.
Any great system of criminal justice must provide one basic protection to its citizenry: protection against arbitrary and lawless seizures of individuals by the State; in other words, protection against jack-booted state agents snatching an otherwise law abiding citizen from his home or the street, casting him into a dark cell without resource to a fair trial conducted by ethical, unbiased prosecutors and juries.
In our system of Criminal Justice this protection is provided by a singular legal institution with a storied history: the writ of Habeas Corpus. In recent times even a conservative United States Supreme Court has acknowledge the central importance of the writ in a series of opinions according the right to a habeas hearing to foreign nationals held in Guantanamo Bay as alleged terrorists.
Commonly described as “The Great Writ”, the Petition for Habeas Corpus is a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxo, and more important, of American Democratic Jurisprudence.
It is no simplification to say that to describe the history of the “Great Writ” is to describe the long and complicated evolution of Anglo-Saxon-American jurisprudence, including the best and essential aspect of what makes our criminal process great and admirable; namely, it is the legal instrument that makes us free from the dead-weight of tyranny.
Habeas corpus- Latin for “you have the body”- is the most important legal instrument for protecting individual freedom from lawless government action. For centuries it has provided protection to foreign national and U.S. citizens by requiring the government to justify any form of detention whenever a Writ is filed, thereby forcing the government to justify the legality of a prisoner’s detention or bring about his immediate release.
With roots in English Common law, the “Great Writ” is guaranteed today by federal statute and the U.S. and State Constitutions.
Habeas Corpus: where and how it is used
Although the primary function of the Writ remains that of challenging custody based on wrongful convictions, such as those based on lack of jurisdiction of the presiding Court, it has been expanded to include constitutional defects in the process by which the defendant has been interned. Morever, the Writ may now be applied to non-criminal circumstances, such as confinement in a mental hospital; to obtain custody of minor children, as well as to request an order for support contingent to a decision on the custody issue; and to challenge pre-trial detention arising from extradition proceedings among many other forms of wrongful detention.
The United States and Connecticut Supreme Court has also gone so far as to suggest that an inmate released from jail (or one not subject to immediate release even if his petition is successful) may have grounds for habeas relief when there are collateral consequences flowing from the conviction which impose significant restraints on liberty (for example the inability to engage in certain activities as a result of the conviction).
In almost all cases, however, the principal use of the Writ is to challenge a criminal conviction. Aside from the few cases where a claim is made that the court had no authority to convict the defendant, almost all habeas cases are based on a single limited claim: that of ineffective assistance of counsel.
More simply put, a citizen held in jail following a criminal conviction will be successful in filing a habeas petition in almost all cases only if he can show that he had an incompetent lawyer.
To be successful in bringing an ineffective assistance claim the petitioner must show two things: a) that his attorney’s representation was not within the range of competence displayed by lawyers with ordinary skill and training in the criminal law; and b) that there is a reasonable probability that but for counsel’s unprofessional errors the ultimate result would have been different.