As a law clerk these last two years at the Portland, Oregon office of the Federal Public Defender, I have come to specialize in habeas corpus. As a habeas geek, it has been one of the greatest privileges of my nascent professional life to work on a US Supreme Court case with former Southern Poverty Law Center legal director Dennis Balske. Unfortunately, we
lost it today, 8-1 (Breyer opinion, Stevens dissent).
The (very) brief version is that our loss will make it harder for many state prisoners to get federal relief from unconstitutional convictions or sentences, even after they exhaust their state appeals, if they have not used exactly the right magic words in those state appeals. We did our best, but we knew after the oral argument in December that our 2-1 judgment in the Ninth Circuit was unlikely to survive. It was an honor to go, but this is a sad result.