High Court Places Hurdle in Inmate Appeal Process

The Supreme Court on Monday made it more difficult for a state prison inmate to reopen his case in federal court.

The 5-4 decision was written by Justice Byron R. White. He was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter and Clarence Thomas.

The decision came in the case of Jose Tamayo-Reyes, a Cuban refugee.

In 1987, Tamayo-Reyes, who spoke little English, pleaded no contest to manslaughter charges after conferring with his lawyer through an interpreter.

After he was confined in an Oregon prison, however, he filed a habeas corpus appeal in a federal court asserting that he had not understood in 1987 that he was in effect pleading guilty to a murder.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tamayo-Reyes was entitled to a hearing in federal court to determine whether the interpreter failed to properly explain the meaning of manslaughter.

But the high court reversed that decision and said state inmates are not entitled to a fact-finding hearing in federal court unless they can show that the alleged error in their trial caused them to be imprisoned.

This is a difficult hurdle and can rarely be surmounted, lawyers said.

The dissenters included Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry A. Blackmun. They were joined by Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, two conservative jurists appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, who contended that the court has gone too far in limiting the “writ of habeas corpus.”

The case was Kenney vs. Tamayo-Reyes, 90-1859.