Justice may be blind, but she ain't swift.

The wheels of justice are turning veeeeeeeery slowly these days, at least in the habeas corpus department. One of my cases has been languishing in the judge's chambers for nearly a year. After my repeated efforts to get the state court record, the judge finally entered an order last month instructing the state court to send over its file to the U.S. District Court. Usually, the state courts respond promptly to such orders. This time, though, weeks went by without any state documents arriving in the federal court clerk's office.

Finally, on Friday, I spoke to the state court. After initially claiming to have never received the federal magistrate judge's order, the clerk finally told me that she'd sent two envelopes of documents to the federal court the week before. I inquired as to how much material she'd sent to the court, and was told it was only a "couple inches" worth of paper. I expressed some surprise, as this case included a fairly lengthy trial, and asked whether this included the transcripts. "Transcripts?" the clerk replied. "The order doesn't say anything about transcripts."

The order does, however, refer instruct the state court to send all records in the case to the federal court. Yet somehow, the state clerk interpreted "all" to mean "some stuff we have but not everything." After a bit of cajoling, she agreed to look for the transcripts, and this morning called to tell me she had put them in the mail today.

This, however, did not end the story. I called over to the federal court clerk's office this morning, in search of the files that supposedly were mailed on January 26. As we'd been told on Friday, they don't have anything in this case. I then called up to the magistrate judge's chambers, and after being bounced around to various people, finally learned that the records had been sent directly to the judge (contrary to the order, which expressly directed the state court to send them to the Clerk of the United States District Court), and were sitting in his chambers. The judge's staff promised to send the files down to the clerk's office, though I still don't understand why they didn't do this two weeks ago when they originally received the record. But finally, some time this week, I will have access to the state court record in this case and can begin preparing a brief in support of my client's habeas petition.

This case illustrates one of the most frustrating aspects of habeas practice: though these cases raise serious questions about the constitutionality of the petitioner's conviction and continued incarceration, the courts perpetually push them to the bottom of their dockets and seem perfectly content to adjudicate them at a glacially-slow pace. In this case, my client is a 25-year-old kid serving a life sentence. Every year that his case drags on further erodes his youth. And even if his petition ultimately fails, the attenuation of his case seems to be hindering his efforts to achieve closure and accept responsibility for his actions.

In 1996, when Congress changed the habeas laws to restrict inmates' ability to bring federal petitions, the purported intention of the law was to speed up the process, particularly in death penalty cases. I haven't seen any empirical studies demonstrating that this "hurry up and kill 'em quicker" law actually has shortened the life span of habeas cases that manage to satisfy the stricter exhaustion and timeliness rules. What I do see, though, is that the combination of a stricter statute of limitations and tight restrictions on successive petitions prevents many state inmates with potentially meritorious claims from ever presenting those claims to a federal court. I'm still trying to understand how any of us benefit from a system that allows serious constitutional violations to go unremedied.