Today’s Hindu carries an opinion piece about one Jeffrey Destovic, and his memories of Obama-nominated Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Imprisoned at the age of 16 for the killing of a high school classmate, Deskovic, now 35, filed a habeas corpus petition in 1997 in U.S. District Court contesting his conviction. The court denied the request because the paperwork had arrived four days late. Deskovic and one of his lawyers — who he said had been misinformed about the deadline for filing — appealed the decision to the federal appellate court on which Ms Sotomayor sat.
Ms Sotomayor, along with the other judge on the panel, ruled that the lawyer’s mistake did not “rise to the level of an extraordinary circumstance” that would compel them to forgive the delay. There was no need to look at the evidence that Deskovic insisted would affirm his innocence, they said.
The facts of Destovic’s arrest:
Deskovic was arrested in 1989 after the police found the body of the classmate, 15-year-old Angela Correa, at a park in Peekskill, in Westchester County, N.Y. Investigators focused on him in part because he seemed unusually distraught over the killing. After several hours of questioning — and after being promised that he would go home if he admitted to the murder — Deskovic confessed.
Sotomayor, however, fares well from a third person viewpoint, known for her aggressive stance on issues like police brutality and the death penalty. Moreover, habeas corpus petitions have a notoriously low success rate in non-capital cases: as the article cites, for example, out of 2,384 randomly selected habeas corpus petitions in 2003 and 2004, only seven had been granted.
The question, therefore, is to what extent Sotomayor’s regard for due process ovverrides her judicial obligation to secure justice, and also to what extent the blame of not granting the appeal rested on her, given the precedents set in this context by others before her. What, moreover, is the importance of one slip?
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Facebook comments:
Powered by Facebook Comments