The Supreme Court’s personal touch

The Supreme Court chooses the cases it hears with an eye toward broad principles, not the fates of individuals. Nevertheless, the court’s decisions often right very specific wrongs. That was true of two rulings Monday, one ordering reconsideration of the deportation of an immigrant convicted of minor drug offenses, the other granting a new appeal to a death row inmate whose lawyer missed a filing deadline.

Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, a native of Mexico, was a lawful permanent resident of the United States with a common-law wife and four children who are U.S. citizens. In 2004 he pleaded guilty in a Texas court to possession of less than two ounces of marijuana, and the next year pleaded guilty to possessing one tablet of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax without a prescription. An immigration judge ordered him deported under a federal law depriving legal immigrants of the right to contest deportation if they committed an “aggravated felony.” In a unanimous decision, the justices held that Carachuri-Rosendo may challenge his deportation order. Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens observed: “We do not usually think of a 10-day sentence for the unauthorized possession of a trivial amount of a prescription drug as an ‘aggravated felony.’”

Albert Holland is a vastly less sympathetic figure than Carachuri-Rosendo. But Holland too was the victim of an almost unimaginable injustice. Convicted in Florida of murdering a police officer and sentenced to death, he trusted his attorney to file a petition for habeas corpus before a one-year deadline established by Congress. Despite Holland’s anxious entreaties, the lawyer missed the deadline. A federal appeals court ruled that even if his lawyer had been grossly negligent, Holland wasn’t entitled to an extension. By a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that judges could extend the law’s deadline and that Holland had the right to seek an extension.

Both of these decisions will have consequences for other cases. Although federal appeals courts already have ruled that habeas deadlines can be extended in some cases, the Holland decision places the imprimatur of the Supreme Court on that conclusion. The Carachuri-Rosendo ruling, though it turned on the fact that Texas hadn’t classified his second conviction as a recidivist offense, nevertheless offers hope to what advocates say are tens of thousands of immigrants who face deportation on exaggerated “aggravated felony” charges.

These decisions would have been unnecessary if a Congress eager to appear “tough on crime” hadn’t approved draconian limits on appeals and disproportionate penalties for drug offenses. The justices’ rebuke of the legislative branch is a reminder that the court is charged not only to interpret the law but also to do justice. Holland and Carachuri-Rosendo put human faces on that vital role.