Why We Need A New Court Of Criminal Appeals

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has frequently made itself a national laughing-stock with some of its absurd opinions. Now, via the Austin American-Statesman, we learn about an attempt to get the state’s highest criminal court to reverse itself on one of its dumber decisions.

Back in 2002, the court ruled that a lawyer’s competence cannot be measured by the quality of the attorney’s habeas petitions–the most important legal tool for a defense lawyer defending a capital murder client.

The court has failed to reverse itself on this important issue in numerous instances, and the ruling has given unqualified lawyers the ability to file shoddy and poorly argued petitions with little fear of repercussions.

Now, two Austin attorneys are asking that the court reverse that decision and providing an example of some very shoddy habeas work:

The brief filed Thursday, titled a motion to reopen, is a painstaking analysis of Wilkinson’s 1998 petition on behalf of Chamberlain, 37. It concluded that much of the Chamberlain petition was taken word for word, with minor editing, from a February 1998 letter Chamberlain wrote telling Wilkinson of “suspected errors” from his trial.

Wilkinson, the brief said, did little more than replace first-person references with Chamberlain’s name, leading to entire passages that bordered on the nonsensical, such as: “(A lawyer) tried to get Karl Eugene Chamberlain to accept the deal by telling Karl Eugene Chamberlain that no matter what sentence Karl Eugene Chamberlain got Karl Eugene Chamberlain would never get out of the penitentiary.”

The brief, which accused Wilkinson of failing to investigate the truth of his client’s claims and support them with legal research, also cites other cases of questionable performance by Wilkinson:

A 2003 habeas petition for Daniel Acker, 90 percent of which was taken from a letter Acker wrote to Wilkinson complaining about his trial. The Acker petition, featured prominently in the American-Statesman examination of the state habeas system, was a collection of first-person rants, misspellings and bad grammar.

While the attorneys appear to have a top-notch claim, they are going to have a tough row to hoe. Asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to listen to reason and logic is like yelling into an vacuum.

This is yet another reason why Democrats need to run competent candidates for the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2008.

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