Who says the Supreme Court doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Update
A reader thinks the Congress, not the Court, is to blame:
I’m not sure if you read the opinion regarding a state prisoner’s
access to a law library, but the post you link to is a flatly
incorrect statement of what the Supreme Court held, and the case does
not imply that “the Supreme Court believes that criminal defendants
representing themselves in court are capable of doing so without
access to a law library.”
As you may know, in 1996 Congress passed, and President Clinton
signed, a bill that sharply curtailed the use of the writ of habeas
corpus by state prisoners. Under its terms, a federal court can’t
grant the writ just because a prisoner’s constitutional rights have
been violated. Instead, the prisoner has to show that the state
court’s decision was not just wrong, but “was contrary to, or involved
an unreasonable application, of clearly established federal law, as
determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” So even though
it was apparently clear under Ninth Circuit precedent that a criminal
pro se defendant is constitutionally required to have access to a law
library, the fact remains that the Supreme Court hasn’t said so.
I think it’s a horrible restriction of the Great Writ, and there’s a
case (also in the Ninth Circuit) now which is considering whether the
restriction is even constitutional. But that wasn’t the issue in this
case. The Supreme Court’s decision seems correct to me (and, clearly,
to the Court’s most liberal, defendant-friendly members). The result
is bad, but the blame should fall on Congress.
This is the sort of case that makes me glad I didn’t go to law school. But it appears that I and my librarian friend have done the Court an injustice. It’s pretty clear that the Patriot Act, however bad it may be, is far from the most outrangeous of the many attacks on the basic principles of liberty under law.