Latest Case: Robinson v. Lewis (Criminal Law)

Trump’s Dubious Use of Clemency Relies on Its Most Conventional Idiom

AUSTIN SARAT

Austin Sarat—Associate Provost, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College—comments on President Trump’s commutation of the sentence of Roger Stone. Sarat observes the pattern of Trump using his exclusive power of clemency to help those who, like Stone, committed crimes that show disdain for the legal process, and he argues that Trump seems “incapable of grasping the meaning of mercy or of understanding its place in a decent society.”

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Robinson v. Lewis

Docket: S228137

Opinion Date: July 20, 2020

Judge: Groban

Areas of Law: Criminal Law

The Supreme Court answered a question posed by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit regarding the time gap between the denial of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in a lower California court and the filing of a new petition in a higher California court raising the same claims for purposes of determining whether a claim was timely presented. The Court summarized the procedures relevant to gap delay and then answered that, during the process, the delay between the filing of a habeas corpus petition challenging a state court judgment in a high court after the lower court denied relief is relevant to the overall question of timeliness of the claims presented in the petition, but no specific time limits exist. Specifically, delay of up to 120 days would not be considered substantial delay and would not alone make the claim untimely if the petition had otherwise presented the claim without substantial delay. Gap delay of more than 120 days is not automatically considered substantial delay but is a relevant factor in a court's analysis under In re Robbins, 18 Cal.4th, 770 (1998).