weekly’s out
Porter v. McCollum, a decision from the Supreme Court, leads off this edition. The Court this term, through its per curiams, seems to be really emphasizing the bright line tests for ineffectiveness. Counsel failed to adequately investigate his client’s military record and the horrors he had seen in the ugly face of war. The aftermath of war, as it does with so many soldiers, left him a broken man. The counsel’s error meant the trial court never heard that story.
The lethal injection scrum reheated since the last edition. The Kentucky Supreme Court in Thomas Clyde Bowling v. Ky. Dep’t of Corr. held that the state’s lethal injection protocol was not adopted in accordance with the Commonwealth’s Administrative Procedure’s Act. The Sixth Circuit, by contrast, in Richard Cooey, II, Kenneth Biros v. Strickland lifted the stay of Mr. Biros’s execution warrant as the stay of next week’s execution was based on concerns related to the old three drug Ohio procedure not the new one drug procedure.
The Texas CCA has issued a much publicized order to show cause to TDS’s David Dow and Katherine Black for a putatively “untimely filing” in a matter where they represented a client facing execution for less than a few weeks when they filed a claim missed by prior counsel.As always, thanks for reading. – k
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