Well, the Supreme Court is on a warpath to strip Americans of their rights.
Do you think they were just gonna stop with women?
A new Supreme Court ruling limits the legal challenges defendants
can make if they were represented by a terrible public defender.
So this is something that is overwhelmingly going to impact people
living in poverty who might be wrongfully convicted of a crime that they
have not committed, and oftentimes because they were given council or
a public defender who was inadequate.
They have an ability to challenge that post conviction.
But the Supreme Court is stripping Americans of that right.
And I wanna give you those details, by the way,
let me just make sure that you're all fully aware that since 1973,
186 people have been freed from death row after they were proved to be innocent.
Okay, so, wrongful convictions happen, they happen quite often and
they overwhelmingly impact people living in poverty.
Now, Shinn v Martinez Ramirez involved two men, David Martinez Ramirez and
Barry Lee Jones who are on death row in Arizona.
The majority determined that inmates can't present new evidence in federal court to
support a claim that their post-conviction attorney in state court was ineffective,
in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution,
which affirms the right to the assistance of counsel in all criminal prosecutions.
So what was the reasoning behind this?
Well, Clarence Thomas wrote the majority conservative opinion here.
A federal habeas court may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise,
consider evidence beyond the state court record based on ineffective assistance
of state post-conviction counsel, Thomas wrote for the majority.
Adding that serial relitigation of final convictions undermines
the finality that is essential to both the retributive, sorry,
I have a hard time saying that word, and deterrent functions of criminal law.
>> Yeah, so let me just summarize here.
If you had ineffective counsel, and when I was a kid, by the way,
I thought that seems like an excuse to try to redo your case.
Now that I'm a grown up, I see that there's incompetence everywhere.
So you tell me there is an incompetent lawyers who, by the way, in their case.
Look, I don't mean to pick on them because they aren't getting paid much, but
it's not the top lawyers in the world okay, that are assigned these cases.
And so some of them, unfortunately not all of them, a lot of them are good hearts,
etc, but some of them are not that good and their lives are on the line.
These defendants lives on the line.
Look at the number Anna gave you, 186 people were gonna kill,
we were gonna murder them.
>> They were on death row.
>> We were going to kill him.
So you could say slice their throats, we weren't gonna slice their throat, but
we were gonna murder them in another way and
then it turns out they were totally innocent, right?
But now, even if you had a crappy lawyer and
then you bring it to the federal appeals court, they go, no Clarence Thomas and
the monsters in the right wing said, we don't care if you're even right.
By the way, you can't introduce new evidence.
One of the loopholes they used to introduce new evidence is
I had ineffective Counsel who did not present this evidence oftentimes because
he was ineffective.
He had exculpatory evidence or he could have found exculpatory evidence and
he didn't.
Okay, so then the court says, and this is unbelievable, but it's true.
We don't care.
We don't care if you're innocent.
There are literally cases where the guy can prove he wasn't even in the state, and
he says, my lawyer didn't introduce the evidence that I wasn't in the state when
the murder happened.
Don't care, go die, go die, we don't care.
We were selected to be barbaric and we are being barbaric.
You can all go, you don't have any rights, freedom.
That's a punchline we use to have the right wing oppress you.
We don't actually believe in freedom.
No, you will stay in jail and we don't give a goddamn that you're innocent.
>> He says it undermines Clarence Thomas it undermines the finality that
is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law, okay.
How so, I'd love to hear an elaboration on that,
because somehow having the ability to provide evidence indicating
that you're innocent does away with deterrence in our criminal justice system?
What?
>> Okay, let's take the best case scenario for him.
He says, look, do we think this guy did it?
He's trying to bring in new evidence that he didn't do it.
But come on, I don't wanna bother listening to that.
What am I, a judge?
Oops, you are.
So he said, but I don't wanna hear that.
If we kill him faster, that way, we'll get retribution quicker and
it will be more of a deterrence to people if they see us killing people left and
right without even checking twice, I would argue that that's not deterrence.
It's more of a deterrent if you know for sure that they got the right guy.
If you think, hey, maybe they'll get the wrong guy and kill him instead of me,
it might encourage you to do more crime.
>> And by the way, I mean, again, who is more likely,
which population is the most likely to be accused of a crime and
then assigned a public defender, who?
>> Poor people.
This country despises poor people.
And the federalist society endorsed judges that sit in
the Supreme Court right now are pro-corporate.
The reason why they were nominated by Republican presidents
is because they love corporate power and they hate the poor,
and their rulings, make that abundantly clear now.
Now Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, and
I wanna read from it to give you a sense of what the liberal justices are saying.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective
assistance of counsel at trial.
This court has recognized that right as a bedrock principle that constitutes
the very foundation for our adversary system of criminal justice.
Today however,
the court hamstrings the federal court's authority to safeguard that right.
The court's decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of
the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any
meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.
She warned, also noting that the ruling all but
overrules to recent precedents, Martinez v Ryan and
Trevino v Thaler, and expect more of that as as we're about to
experience later in June with the reversal of Roe v Wade.
The Supreme Court has absolutely no interest in maintaining
longstanding laws or precedent.
They don't care.
They were put there for a specific reason and it's to crush you.
And that is what they're carrying out as we speak.
>> So that's literal, I'm gonna explain that.
So, last things here.
First of all, Republicans pretend to be populists these days, hilarious.
Don't look at what they're saying, look at what they're doing.
Every law they pass is tax goes for the rich.
And if you're poor and you didn't do it, who cares?
Let's rip his freedom away.
They're getting financed by people like private prison systems,
who make money by taking your freedom away and stuffing you into a prison.
Who takes the most amount of checks from them?
The Republican Party.
They don't mind taking your freedom away, and if you're poor, God help you,
you're voting for a Republican, you're the biggest schmuck there is.
Look, at this point, I loathe the Democratic leadership.
So I'm not telling you like, Nancy Pelosi is gonna save you.
She ain't gonna do nothing.
She's an elitist too, okay?
But the Republicans are nowhere near populist.
They are now and have always been for the rich.
Now, last thing is about the justices.
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh literally had two cases where they said it's okay for
a corporation to kill you.
They're almost only judges in the country that have ever ruled that way.
In the Gorsuch case, it was a trucker and
the corporation ordered the trucker to freeze to death.
And the trucker had the temerity to not freeze to death.
And Gorsuch said, was the only judge that looked at that case out of a ton of judges
as it went through the appeals system, that said, yeah, he should have died.
If a corporation tells you to die, obey and die already, okay?
He said, well, I mean, I'm not saying you should die,
he should just get fired for not dying.
And in the sea world case that Kavanaugh said, yeah,
if the killer whale eats you, that's your problem, okay?
That's not the poor employer's problem just cuz he put you next to
a killer whale.
Corporations are allowed to kill you, and
then the Republicans pretend to be populist.
No, they're just servants of the rich and of corporate executives.
That's reality.