The right of state court prisoners to petition the federalcourts for habeas corpus goes back to 1867. The willingness of federal courts to correct unjust state court outcomes reached a pinnacle during a roughly two-decade period that began in the civil rights era, but the tide then began to turn the other way. More recently, in 1996, Congress passed a statute, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) that further limited the availability of habeas relief. And in the years since, the Supreme Court, by narrowly interpreting one of AEDPA’s important provisions, came close to completely choking off the ability of many state court prisoners to get relief, even where it was beyond dispute that the state court conviction resulted from a deprivation of constitutional rights. But as explained below, as the result of a very recent Supreme Court decision in Lafler v. Cooper, 132 S. Ct. 1376 (2012), the skies for habeas petitioners may have significantly brightened.
So far, Cooper has been extolled for something elseits expansion of the right to effective assistance of counsel in the plea bargaining context. But Cooper may ultimately be better known for the far-reaching way it alters the landscape for all kinds of habeas claims.
Paths to Relief
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