In the eighth installment of his series unpacking Supreme Court Cases that reveal complex or unsavory truths about our country and how the legal interpretation of its founding principles have evolved throughout the centuries and the first in a duology focusing on the draft, Bryan examines a somewhat-recent decision that dealt with the proper application of the writ of habeas corpus and the rights of innocents under the Constitution.
If the general American public knows one legal term, it is habeas corpus. This touchstone of the rights of the accused comes from the practices of English common law, and translated from Latin means “you have the body.” Essentially, a writ of habeas corpus obligates law enforcement to produce a prisoner held in their custody both to prove that the individual in question has been treated appropriately and to ensure that they have been detained on acceptable legal grounds. These writs are thus one of the first lines of defense against abuse of the judicial system, and the decision of Abraham Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus so as to better combat insurrection and subversive agents at the opening of the American Civil War remains one of the most hotly contested legal actions of any president. During peacetime, however, these writs have been nigh-inviolable. When I learned of a 1990s Supreme Court decision that denied a writ issued for a man on death row, then, I was darkly intrigued; the last three decades of the twentieth century in many ways saw a rollback of traditionally robust legal rights, and I thought I might have found the next installment in my Remedial Case Studies series. Instead, I discovered a case that feels typically legal, one that turned on specific definitions and purposes and shows that there is no magical talisman we can use to exonerate the innocent.
The night of September 29, 1981 was not a good one for police in the valley of the Rio Grande. A passerby discovered the body of State Trooper David Rucker beside his patrol car, shot in the head. Soon afterward, Los Fresnos police officer Enrique Carrisalez witnessed a speeding vehicle on the same highway, moving away from the site of Rucker’s murder. Carrisalez, along with his civilian friend Enrique Hernandez, gave chase and ultimately pulled over the offending driver. The driver opened the door and briefly spoke to Carrisalez before shooting the officer at least once in the chest before fleeing. Carrisalez would die in the hospital, eight days later.
The following day, October 7, 1981, police arrested Leonel Herrera for the murder of both Rucker and Carrisalez. The car identified by Enrique Hernandez was registered to Herrera’s girlfriend, and indeed Herrera was in possession of its keys at the time of his arrest—along with a handwritten letter bearing his fingerprints strongly implying he was responsible, if not confessing, to both murders. His Social Security card had been found on the ground near Rucker’s body, and blood matching Rucker’s blood type had been found on Herrera’s jeans, wallet, and the car. If that were not enough, the stolen service weapon of another officer killed two years prior was also found in Herrera’s home. Herrera was convicted of the murder of Rucker and pled guilty to the murder of Carrisalez in January of 1982 and sentenced to death.
A decade later, Herrera attempted to escape the fate that awaited him on death row by filing a writ of habeas corpus. In it, he and his lawyers pointed to new evidence that indicated Herrera was innocent of the two murders, arguing that to execute an innocent man would violate the 8th Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. This new evidence consisted of two affidavits, one from the lawyer of Herrera’s brother Raul Herrera, Sr. and the other from Raul’s former cellmate from prison, alleging that Raul had told them that he, not Leonel, had been the one to murder Rucker and Carrisalez that night in 1981. Raul himself could not testify either way; he had been murdered in prison in 1984. As this meant that the purported evidence consisted of hearsay and could not be sufficiently examined in a court and under oath, the United States District Court for Southern Texas denied the living Herrera’s writ and refused to consider the evidence for a stay of execution. Herrera’s appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was similarly denied, and in 1992 his writ would be heard before the Supreme Court in what would become known as Herrera v. Collins.
In their 6-3 decision, the justices of the Court ruled with both lower courts, denying Herrera both his writ and stay. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointed out that, as I briefly explained in the introduction to this very post, writs of habeas corpus are meant to address very specific conditions and possible abuse: they are a tool for ensuring prisoners are not being hidden away, mistreated, or held indefinitely or on inadequate charges. They do not depend on the guilt or innocence of the detained individual, and so have no bearing on Herrera’s claims. This meant that the justices really had no obligation to rule on whether the execution of an innocent person qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. It’s hard to imagine it qualifies as anything but, however, and this is exactly what the three dissenting justices argued in their dissent. That said, I personally think the response of both lower courts was perfectly reasonable and in line with the impartial carriage of justice; unsubstantiated hearsay from, purportedly, a victim’s family member a decade after the original trial hardly raises a reasonable doubt as to guilt, especially when arrayed against the mountain of damning evidence originally brought to court.
Some might call this decision in Herrera one based on a technicality—and they’d be right. That doesn’t mean the case was wrongly decided, however, and it serves as exactly the kind of lesson I began this series of posts to discuss. Our legal system does not operate on vibes, or even on general realities; it works through specific laws and systems and actions, all with their own clearly defined purposes. While much of those mechanisms could use some improvement, even radical overhaul, it’s only by understanding just how the law works that we can hope to achieve what justice we can and know exactly what does need changing.