At the Supreme Court, the least significant and least noticed cases sometimes say the most about the institution and our system of justice. Dretke v. Haley, decided last month with no fanfare, is just such a case. Unfortunately, the story it tells is of an institution and a system remarkably unconcerned with the common call simply to do the right thing.
Everyone involved in Michael Wayne Haley's case - the State of Texas, which prosecuted him; the lower federal court judges who heard his case; and all the U.S. Supreme Court's Justices - recognize that he's been in jail more than six years for a crime carrying a maximum sentence of two years. The lower federal courts ordered Haley released. But Texas, despite agreeing that Haley is serving time under an unlawful sentence, still appealed to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in jail. And the Supreme Court, rather than setting him free, doomed him to another long round of litigation in the lower courts.
How does this happen? The story of Haley's case illustrates how hard it can be to correct, through our system, what is really a simple and straightforward injustice.
The Facts of Haley's Case: Why He Got Sixteen Years When Only Eligible for Two
In 1997, Haley was arrested for stealing a calculator from a Wal-Mart. At trial, he was convicted of theft. Because Hale had two prior theft convictions, his relatively minor crime was punishable by up to two years in prison.
Not satisfied, Haley's prosecutors also charged him with the separate offense of being a habitual felony offender, under Texas's "three strikes" law.
continued at http://writ.news.findlaw.com/lazarus/20040610.html
Edward Lazarus, a FindLaw columnist, writes about, practices, and teaches law in Los Angeles. A former federal prosecutor, he is the author of two books - most recently, Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court.