EMAIL OF THE DAY II

“Your complaint about Rick Santorum should have been more nuanced. There has always been federal review of death sentences, on some level, through federal habeas corpus proceedings as a collateral attack on state-court judgments. And when Congress gave the federal courts jurisdiction to hear the Schiavo case, there was likewise federal review of that “death sentence” as well. I don’t know if Santorum’s a lawyer; if he is, he clearly skipped out on his first-year civil procedure class. Just because a federal court has jurisdiction to review a claim does not mean that that court will decide it differently than the state courts. (This is, after all, the big complaint about federal review of death penalty cases – that federal courts are overturning the presumptively correct decisions of state courts.) From a legal standpoint, the shocking and unprincipled argument Frist and Santorum and their ilk were making was that federal courts should step in and overturn state-court judgments in cases where it suits them (Schiavo, et al.) and refrain from doing so in cases where it doesn’t (death penalty). This isn’t principle, it’s politics, and most Americans saw right through it.”