On May 23, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision written by Clarence Thomas. It overturned an important constitutional protection for people fighting wrongful convictions in state courts. As one law professor put it in basic terms, “So, if you have a shitty trial lawyer and a shitty appeals lawyer and a mountain of evidence you are innocent you still cannot get any relief to get your conviction overturned.”

The injustice system in the U.S. is plagued with notoriously overworked and under-resourced attorneys appointed to represent poor defendants. And getting a private attorney is also no guarantee of even basic competent legal representation.

Well-established Supreme Court decisions have held that the 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees legal representation for anyone facing a criminal charge that carries prison time. More, if a defendant could show that their legal counsel did not provide competent legal representation, then it was possible to get relief by going into federal courts under the 6th Amendment to make this showing. To show that the defendant’s counsel had been incompetent often required introducing evidence of the defendant’s innocence that had not been brought out in the trial or appeal due to this incompetence.  The opportunity to do this at the federal court level is at the heart of what the Supreme Court ruling just struck down, by barring a federal court evidentiary hearing into incompetent counsel which by definition often includes evidence of innocence that was omitted at trial.

For instance, if you had an alibi that you were in a different state at the time of a murder and there was video evidence of your presence in another state, but your incompetent lawyer didn’t track it down—your only relief was to go into federal court and put the video on as evidence that your lawyer did a bad job. The Supreme Court basically just said, “F* you. We don’t care. You will still be executed even if you are innocent.”

Sonia Sotomayor’s blistering dissent called the majority decision “perverse” and “illogical.”

Representatives of the Innocence Project, the Equal Justice Initiative, and criminal defense lawyers decried this decision. Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns wrote in a December 2021 op-ed column in the New York Times about this case, “Since 1989, almost 3,000 people have been wrongfully convicted of crimes in the United States. And since 1973, 186 people condemned to death have been exonerated. Bad lawyering—including poor preparation, inadequate investigation and intrinsic bias—was a leading cause.” Her organization said the ability of federal courts to conduct evidentiary hearings into such claims was crucial. Mark Stern from Slate tweeted that “the absolutely atrocious” opinion “effectively ensures that innocent people will remain imprisoned.”

This Supreme Court decision says that the federal courts should not interfere in the sanctity of the state courts’ enforcement of their criminal laws by providing this avenue of relief to defendants fighting to overturn convictions. It is not hard to envision where this is headed. For one, Thomas was joined by two others of the current justices who have written minority opinions a few years ago in cases where they argue that the Constitution does not guarantee legal representation to defendants (much less competent counsel). They argue that the Constitution only protects a defendant’s right to “employ” counsel. Further, this decision stinks of “states’ rights,” which was the segregationist-KKK-good ol’ boy rallying cry for their white supremacist terrorizing of Black people, including through their states' judicial systems.

Contrast all this with the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, on not just the very important right to legal representation, but allocation of resources for defense of people accused of crimes on a par with the state’s prosecutorial resources. The following are just some excerpts from two sections regarding the justice and legal systems, including the rights of people accused of crimes.