In this extraordinary NY Sunday Times article, U.S. Supreme Court sources provide highly unusual and scathing public criticism of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals‘ handling of appeals of Texas Death Row inmates. The Houston Chronicle chimes in with a similar article here.
My sense is that the Fifth Circuit judges will not be exchanging Holiday Greeting cards this year with the SCOTUS Justices. And with good reason. The Fifth Circuit must attempt to decipher SCOTUS’s almost indecipherable standards for setting aside death penalty convictions while administering hundreds more of such cases each year than SCOTUS. Although excess volume certainly does justify sloppy adjudication, SCOTUS’s difficult-to-ascertain standards — coupled with prisoners’ easy access to the appellate process — is the real culprit here, not any disrespect for SCOTUS or political agenda, as the NY Times article suggests.