Here in the The Land of the Incarcerated we happen to be fans of murdering people whose negligent lawyers fail to file their petitions for writ of habeas corpus on time. Some facts, taken verbatim from the just decided Supreme Court case Holland v. Florida:
- Holland's court-appointed attorney, Bradley Collins, failed to file a timely federal petition, despite Holland’s many letters emphasizing the importance of doing so.
- Collins apparently did not do the research necessary to find out the proper filing date, despite the fact that Holland had identified the applicable legal rules for him.
- Collins failed to inform Holland in a timely manner that the State Supreme Court had decided his case, despite Holland’s many pleas for that information.
- Collins failed to communicate with Holland over a period of years, despite Holland’s pleas for responses to his letters.
Holland is facing the death penalty with a grossly negligent lawyer he can't get removed from his case. Indeed, he can't get his lawyer removed because the State perversely required that his lawyer file the paperwork to get himself removed. So Holland files a pro se federal habeas petition. But it's a few weeks late. Now the deadline for filing these petitions can be extended in "extraordinary circumstances", but the lower courts held that the deadline could not be extended in Holland's circumstances, on the basis that he wasn't sufficiently diligent (exercising diligence is a necessary condition for an extension). This is clearly false, for he was very diligent, and it provides the basis for the SCOTUS reversing and remanding to the lower court for another try.
But what else did the Supreme Court say? They held that while "extraordinary circumstances" can justify a deadline extension, a lawyer's negligence, no matter how gross, can never constitute an extraordinary circumstance. For the lawyer is the client's agent, and so the lawyer's actions are the client's actions. An extraordinary circumstance has to be somehow "external" to the client. But since the lawyer's acts are the client's acts, they cannot be external to the client. (The putative justification for this asinine lunacy appears pretty pathetic, and sadly, it's primarily provided by the Supreme Court's own precedents.)
In the words of Antonin "Vaffanculo" Scalia:
Because the attorney is the litigant’s agent, the attorney’s acts (or failures to act) within the scope of the representation are treated as those of his client, see Link v. Wabash R. Co., 370 U. S. 626, 633–634, and n. 10 (1962), and thus such acts (or failures to act) are necessarily not extraordinary circumstances.
So our "justice" system permits people to be executed when their court-appointed lawyers are demonstrably utterly incompetent and grossly negligent idiots. That's despicable. Cited and endorsed in the Holland v. Florida decision, we get:
We will assume that Collins’s alleged conduct is negligent, even grossly negligent. But in our view, no allegation of lawyer negligence or of failure to meet a lawyer’s standard of care—in the absence of an allegation and proof of bad faith, dishonesty, divided loyalty, mental impairment or so forth on the lawyer’s part—can rise to the level of egregious attorney misconduct that would entitle Petitioner to equitable tolling [that is, an extension].
The above is the view of the wicked, and it's a shame there's no hell for people who codify trash like that into law to burn in. From For the Defense:
In your civil case, if the lawyer screws up, you sue the lawyer. If you can prove that the lawyer cost you, the lawyer (or the lawyer's malpractice carrier) is supposed to pay what you lost.In your ordinary criminal case, if the lawyer screws up, you may be screwed, but you can sue the lawyer and maybe get some cash out of it.In your death penalty case, if the lawyer screws up, you get killed.
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