The Supreme Court on Monday granted the State of Arizona’s request to bar death penalty defendants from bringing new evidence showing their attorneys were incompetent when challenging their convictions in federal court and ruled that federal courts considering habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases “may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state-court record based on the ineffective assistance of state postconviction counsel”.
All six Republican-appointed justices voted to reverse rulings by Arizona federal judges and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which had allowed David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones to present evidence supporting claims that the attorneys who had their handled post-conviction appeals in state courts had been so ineffective that their right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment to the US constitution had been violated.
