Most citizens would agree that they don’t know anything about the AEDPA, and much less even know when the particular law was introduced and why was it passed into law in this country in the first instance. What is the AEDPA? The acronym AEDPA is defined as the Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress passed in 1996, by introducing a greater degree of finality of judgments in habeas corpus proceedings. This bill was initiated and presented by the Republican Party in agreement, as an exchange, quid pro quo, with the Democratic Party in concert, wherein President Bill Clinton conceded to sign into law.
The problem the AEDPA has created, as a precedent, is that most Americans lack the fundamental understanding about the totality of the far reaching implications, as proven by the booming expansion of Pennsylvania’s prison population, the majority of whom are poor and people of color that are mostly from economically depressed and inner city areas, which stem from deep cuts in spending and legal services for those who are indigent or otherwise cannot afford attorneys, etc. Thereby, due to the increase in the politicization of the state judiciary and, perhaps more importantly, the realization that there is an effort to clear away any and all obstacles which stand in the way of running a smooth and efficient apparatus of death; the Pennsylvania criminal justice system is the blueprint from a third world nature. Indicated and highlighted by the House Judiciary, there was concern that this would streamline and curtail the number of increasing applications from state prisoners that greatly interfered with the procedures and processes of the state courts, by delaying many cases and proper enforcement of their judgment. In 1995, Pennsylvania passed the Post Conviction Relief Act, PCRA, which is bereft of any type of fundamental relief, reducing collateral proceedings to a virtual futile exercise unless this is the prisoner’s very first PCRA filed within the narrow timeline of one year after the affirmance of conviction in the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court.
Further, as an example, in the state of Pennsylvania, there is no statute of limitations on a general charge of murder. The murder case remains open as many years as it takes to either investigate and/or solve the case. After capturing the alleged culprit and charging him or her with the offenses of murder, the judicial proceedings are automatically invoked, and he or she is provided with the basic representation of a public defender and/or court appointed, to represent the alleged perpetrator through the preliminary hearings, court proceedings and appeals, etc. Upon being found guilty by a jury of your peers, the appellate process begins, and he or she proceeds to file a direct appeal, and this gets affirmed, and then permission to file allegata with the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. Assuming the denial of his or her appeals, the PCRA is filed and the clock begins ticking downward within the narrow time frame of one year. The irony in all of this is that an actually innocent prisoner, who lacks the comprehension of the science of laws, fall under the scope and purview of the AEDPA. He or she has to navigate through a myriad of time bar limits, procedural bars, and issues of waiver.
The lawmakers designed this explicitly to sabotage the prisoner’s constitutional rights and protections to remain in prison for the rest of his or her life under a gross miscarriage of justice which offends the fundamental aspects of our Constitution when it comes to protecting the actually innocent. Under the umbrella of the Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, gives exclusive deference applicable to those prisoners who have been convicted of a capital offense, subjected to the imminent circumstances of facing death every waking night and day throughout the exhaustion process, until finality is reached. You may conclude that the AEDPA model blueprint was designed to imprison all guilty men, including the actually innocent, devoid of any legal avenues to gain relief from the beginning stages of the PCRA throughout the federal courts. The exhaustion process is nothing more than a merry go round in name only by sending papers to the state federal courts, likened to throwing court papers into the air in hopes of having your legal petitions land in the hands of the Clerk of the Court in a timely manner.
An actually innocent man and woman is burdened with presenting his or her claims by presenting newly discovered materials and/or exculpatory evidence to overcome the time bar hurdles to present to the courts and have them conduct a perfunctory review in order to consider the merits of his or her claims, subsequently to determine if his or her appeals have been submitted within the narrow one year statute of limitations. Then, decide if the petitioner is entitled to a new trial, if it is determined that he or she was wrongfully convicted and found to suffer gross miscarriage of justice, the third world blueprint AEDPA, Pennsylvania’s criminal justice system has literally dismantled and obliterated the constitutional provisions which were formally in place to protect the actually innocent from being unjustly convicted, but more importantly, to safeguard the actually innocent men and women from remaining under such a gross miscarriage of justice forever.
The most important changes to the 1995 Post Conviction Relief Act herein after PCRA were number one, all previous remedies a petitioner might pursue as common law, habeas corpus or coram nobis, were to be completely and utterly subsumed under the PCRA. Number two, there was, for the first time, a one year statute of limitations. And three, there would only be three exceptions to the one year time limit that was eliminated from final passage of the amendments to the 1995 PCRA, as noted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Lambert vs. Blackwell, 1997. That exception would have allowed a waiver where there is a compelling need to address the claims because of a fundamentally unfair trial, illegal sentence, or some other manifest injustice. This became known amongst the House and Senate members as the manifest injustice exception to the bar of waiver. The right wingers of the Pennsylvania House defeated this sensible amendment because it would eventually opened up Pandora’s box for Pennsylvania’s appellate courts. Representative Piccola, from Dauphin County, argued that the case law did not provide guidance on what constituted a manifest injustice. In practical effect, what occurred was, as U.S. District Judge Stewart J. Dalzell stated in April 1997, ruling freeing Lisa Michelle Lambert: the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1995 decided to kick the actual innocence ball into federal court. Before the 1995 amendment, he noted, “The PCRA excused waiver if the alleged error has resulted in the conviction or affirmance of sentence of an actually innocent individual.”
The appellate judges, D.A.’s Bar Association, members, and other policymakers continue to pay lip service to the writs of habeas corpus and coram nobis by saying, “We haven’t done away with those. You can still follow them.” But in opinion after opinion after opinion, the appellate courts in Pennsylvania simply have brushed away all such writs, regardless of what the direct or collateral consequences were for the initial conviction. As another example, in the paper authored and presented by the Academy of Criminal Justice and Sciences of April, 2001, Lambert’s case was discussed. It represents one of the most controversial cases in Pennsylvania history, in American legal jurisprudence. The Lambert case involved numerous claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and other allegations in the context of after-discovered evidence. The Lambert case was the focus of an ABC News special, “Law and Justice Unit,” which aired on August 25, 2001. The program had assembled a team of prime and legal reporters, a defense attorney, a prosecutor, a police official and other legal analysts. The panel debated pro and con, the merits of Lamberts appeal; whether federal U.S. District Judge Stewart J. Dalzell was correct in granting her writ of habeas corpus and ordering her release. In his original April 1997 ruling, Judge Dalzell stated, rather emphatically, “We have found that virtually all the evidence which the Commonwealth used to convict Lisa Michelle Lambert of first degree murder was either perjured, altered or fabricated. The Commonwealth has even attempted to perpetrate a fraud on this court. Such total contempt for due process of law demands serious sanctions.” Judge Dalzell has also delivered a stinging indictment of Lancaster County’s criminal justice system when he invited both sides to cite [unclear] to any case from any jurisdiction in the English speaking world where there was more prosecutorial misconduct. Before proceeding further into this fascinating debate, and veritable tug of war, between the state and federal court in Pennsylvania, it would be helpful to recap briefly the procedural history of Lambert’s case.
Following the April 1997 Dalzell ruling, an appeal by the Commonwealth was taken to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The appeal was spearheaded by a powerful coalition of association, which included Richard Sprague, Pennsylvania Attorney General Michael D. Fisher [D. Michael Fisher], the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and the Pennsylvania District Attorney’s Association. Caving into the pressure of this cabal, the appeals court overruled Judge Dalzell’s ruling on a procedural technicality and sent the case back to the state court. In February, 1998, Lambert followed her PCRA petition. It contained nearly 200 claims of after discovered evidence, discovery violations and ineffective assistance of counsel, following extensive proceedings and numerous evidentiary hearings covering more than an unprecedented eight weeks. Lancaster County Judge Lawrence Stengel issued a 320 page opinion in November of 1998 denying Lambert on all her claims for relief. The Pennsylvania Superior Court followed suit by issuing 107 page opinion in December 2000, affirming Judge Stengel. The next move for Lambert’s lawyers was to forsake a petition for allowance of appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and instead return once again to the federal court.
Lambert filed her third amended petition for habeas corpus relief on January 29, 2001, albeit under a new civil action number. The case was reassigned to Judge Dalzell. Meanwhile, upon learning of this development, the Commonwealth renewed its effort to have Dalzell removed from the case, either by recusal or action by the higher court. They additionally tried to have Lambert’s petition kicked out of the court for lack of time limits under the AEDPA. Dalzell issued preliminary hearings, rebuffing the Commonwealth efforts. The bombshell for the Commonwealth came on November 21, 2001, when Judge Dalzell handed down a 32 page ruling reinstating the findings of fact and conclusions of law he made in his April, 1997 ruling. Most of his memorandum opinion dealt with the various procedural objections and technicalities the Commonwealth raised. For example, on the issue of timeliness, the court was quite blunt in stating, “The Commonwealth’s proffered fiction founders on its confusion regarding the application of the limitation provisions of the AEDPA as they apply here.” He concluded, “Even if there were merits to the idea of a fictional snuffing out of Lambert’s earlier petition, her petition is, in all events, timely.” Bryant Arroyo for Prison Radio. Inside the face and nation of prisoners.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
