SCOTUS to Rule on Right to Counsel in Collateral Proceedings

Although the Supreme Court has long recognized that defendants have a right to counsel at the first level of direct appeal, the Court has thus far declined to extend this right to collateral post-conviction proceedings, such as habeas corpus.  Earlier this week, however, the Court agreed to hear a case that will test how firm the distinction really is.  Martinez v. Ryan (No. 10-1001) involves a state-court defendant’s attempt to litigate a claim in collateral proceedings that he was prohibited from raising on direct appeal.  If he has no right to counsel in his collateral proceeding, then he has no right to counsel at all as to this issue.

Here’s what happened.

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SCOTUS Rules That Current Penalties Do Not Govern Whether Prior Conviction Is ACCA Predicate

I continue to be mystified by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the Armed Career Criminal Act.  The Court has been remarkably active in taking ACCA cases in recent years, but I’m hard-pressed to see much coherence in the outcomes.  On the one hand, there is the Begay line of cases, which have substantially narrowed the definition of “violent felonies” that can be used as a predicate for the ACCA fifteen-year mandatory minimum.  (For background, see my post here.)  Yet, there are plenty of other ACCA cases – many involving short, unanimous decisions, as if the underlying legal issues were entirely unproblematic  – that adopt unnecessarily expansive interpretations of the ACCA triggering language.

Count the Court’s decision today in McNeill v. United States (No. 10-5258) in the latter category.

Here’s the background on McNeill from an earlier post:

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Fowler, Federalization, and Statutory Interpretation

Brown v. Plata grabbed the headlines last week, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Fowler v. United States (No. 10-5443) also merits attention for what it has to say about the federalization of criminal law and the interpretation of criminal statutes.  The case also nicely illustrates the way that the Court’s stereotypical ideological divisions (so starkly manifest in Brown) break down when the Court moves out of politically charged areas of constitutional law (e.g., the Fourth and Eighth Amendments) and into the interpretation of federal criminal statutes.

Here’s what happened.  While preparing to rob a bank, Fowler and some confederates were discovered by a local police officer, whom Fowler then killed.  Fowler was later convicted in federal court under the witness tampering statute, which makes it a crime “to kill another person, with intent to . . . prevent the communication by any person to a [federal] law enforcement officer” of “information relating to the . . . possible commission of a Federal offense,” 18 U.S.C. § 1512(a)(1)(C).

Fowler’s intended bank robbery counts as a federal offense, and Fowler clearly killed the police officer in order to prevent him from communicating information relating to this offense.  The only question in the case was whether Fowler had the intent to prevent communication to a federal law enforcement officer.  There was no evidence that Fowler actually contemplated that his victim might report the crime to federal authorities, as opposed simply to calling in additional local cops.  But does the statute really require the defendant to be thinking about federal involvement?

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