The Hope of Justice: The Great Writ
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When you’re wrongly convicted of a crime, illegally sentenced to death or life in prison at twenty years of age, you quickly become desperate. You arrive in one of the growing hundreds of prisons and jails in America where the frim reality of extended confinement robs you of your identity, freedom, family, dreams, and aspirations, and you fear that ultimately it will take your life. Your insistent protestations about innocence, your complaints about an unfair trial, and your enraged cries of an unjust verdict are immediately silenced by the isolation of prison. Slowly you being to realize that it’s just a matter of time before you’re going to lose the one thing you absolutely must have to get out and ever succeed again, your hope. The struggle against hopelessness may be the greatest challenge of imprisonment. Finding the courage to persevere against an unlawful detention in a system of justice that is deliberately indifferent to its mistakes and arbitrariness may be considerably harder than facing the constant dangers, treachery, and anguish of confinement. The sense of rage and frustration emanating from the certain belief that you’ve been convicted in violation of the law is destructive and disorienting. Your assumptions about what’s fair, right, and legitimate in the administration of criminal justice are radically altered. To some it is ironic that correct application of the law is so important to prisoners. Yet the moral authority to punish someone for breaking the law is dependent on a commitment by organized society to follow the law. To the condemned and imprisoned, violating the Constitution to obtain a conviction reveals a cynicism about the law so that the violation can never adequately be described as a technicality. It feed the bitterness and resignation that breed recidivism among those convicted of crimes. Worse, it deconstructs the morality of criminal law leaving the powerful to exercise power against the powerless without a commitment to demand lawful conduct of everyone. Thousands of men, women, and juveniles have found themselves in jails and prisons across America struggling against the oppressive reality of an unjust conviction. Their only hope for justice is a single obscure remedy: the writ of habeas corpus. The Great Writ. The renowned legal historian Blackstone described the writ of habeas corpus as the “most celebrated writ in the English law.” Justice Brennan, in Fay v. Noia (1963), defined the writ of habeas corpus as a device to protect the principle that “in a civilized society, government must always be accountable to the judiciary for a man’s imprisonment: if the imprisonment cannot be shown to conform with the fundamental requirements of the law, the individual is entitled to immediate release.” Yet, despite the lofty office of habeas corpus in Anglo-American legal jurisprudence, it has devolved into a process that elevates form over substance.
Source Publication
Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence
Source Editors/Authors
E. Joshua Rosenkranz, Bernard Schwartz
Publication Date
1997
Recommended Citation
Stevenson, Bryan A., "The Hope of Justice: The Great Writ" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 1735.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1735
