Ellen Reasonover lost 16 years of her life sitting in a Missouri jail because she volunteered information to the St. Louis Police. After reading about the murder of a gas station attendant in the newspaper, she went forward to tell police that she might have seen the murderer's face. For her good citizenship, she was arrested in 1984 and later convicted of the murder by an all-white jury.

A soft-spoken, 42-year old black woman, she is free today because a federal judge reviewed her state conviction on appeal. The review uncovered evidence that police had bribed prison snitches to testify that Reasonover had made "jailhouse confessions" that she had committed the murder.

Instances of overzealous prosecutors and corrupt police obtaining convictions on bad or no evidence are unfortunately not uncommon. In fact, the state of Illinois just placed a moratorium on executions due to a lengthy history of wrongful convictions. But what makes this case special is that Reasonover nearly didn't get to appeal -- and would not be able to do so today.

Why? Because in 1996 Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a law that does much more than its title suggests. It could prevent black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from having a federal court review the evidence in his case, and might have kept Reuben "Hurricane" Carter in jail indefinitely.

This Act, which was opposed bitterly by groups ranging from the far-right Gun Owners of America to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, says federal judges have no authority to review state court convictions unless there is a finding that the state court judge acted "unreasonably" on a Constitutional issue. Even evidence that proves a convicted person is innocent can no longer be used to seek an appeal unless the convict can demonstrate that they could not have discovered that evidence during or immediately after the trial. Click here to read about why the law was passed.

In Reasonover's case, for example, evidence that the snitches had been paid to lie could not be used now under the act as the basis of an appeal. Prosecutors could claim that a competent defense attorney could have questioned those witnesses to discover their backgrounds and the dishonest nature of their testimony -- something Reasonover's court-appointed lawyer didn't bother to do.

In other words, under the 1996 law, people can sit in jail for years - and even be executed -- despite solid evidence that they are probably innocent or that corrupt police or prosecutors rigged the case against them.

The law has been challenged on constitutional grounds, and several cases appear headed towards the Supreme Court. In one case, Williams vs. Taylor, a federal court granted a review to Terry Williams, a Virginia death-row inmate because the federal judge found that state prosecutors had withheld evidence of both jury misconduct and information that would have impeached the credibility of a key prosecution witness. Based upon the Effective Death Penalty Act, the Virginia Attorney General has appealed the federal district court's granting of the hearing, arguing that the defendant could have discovered the evidence of misconduct if his state-appointed lawyer had tried harder. Arguments in this case have been presented to the Supreme Court, and a ruling could come as early as next month.

Scrambling to Appeal

Reasonover was lucky. Attorneys handling her appeal in early 1996 saw the new act coming and filed it the day before it was signed into law. "We scrambled to get that thing filed and got in just under the wire," recalls attorney Sean O'Brien of the Public Interest Litigation Center in St. Louis. "It wasn't the most elegant appeal, but it did the job.

"If Ellen had filed her appeal a day later, under the terms of the Effective Death Penalty Act the federal court could not have reviewed her case," says O'Brien. "She'd still be in jail, with no recourse whatsoever."

The Reasonover case highlights a little-known aspect of the law: Despite its name, it isn't just about capital punishment. Reasonover wasn't scheduled to die for the crime she was wrongly convicted of committing; she was just sentenced to prison.

"That act was a kind of bizarre way of responding to what some people saw as a problem -- murderers delaying their executions," says O'Brien. "We have two million people in prison, and only 3,700 of them are on death row. Yet Congress has removed the fundamental right of habeas corpus appeal for all people who are in jail (because of criminal convictions by states), not just the death row cases."

Habeas corpus appeals of non-capital criminal convictions are relatively rare. Jim Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University who specializes in habeas corpus law, points out that only prisoners on death row are legally entitled to a court appointed attorney to handle their habeas corpus appeals -- an increasingly complex legal procedure. Other prisoners are on their own. They must either become their own lawyers, or somehow pay the $50,000, that a federal appeal costs, on average, according to Dick Burr, a death penalty defense attorney in Houston, Texas.

As a result, only 10,000 habeas corpus appeals are filed a year -- a number that has been holding steady since 1970, when the prison population was one-third of what it is today. There was, in other words, no "habeas corpus crisis" when Congress passed the Effective Death Penalty Act, but it became law with little notice anyway.

"I guess most people don't know much about it," says Erich Pratt, director of federal affairs for the Springfield, Virginia-based Gun Owners of America. "If you asked most people on the street what a habeas corpus was, they'd probably slap you. But it's one of the most basic rights we have as Americans, and one of the greatest protectors of our liberty." Click here to read about why this constitutional shift is happening.

Speeding Up Cases

Advocates of the Effective Death Penalty law, like the National Association of Attorneys General and others, argue that it is needed because convicted murderers and their anti-death penalty allies have abused federal habeas corpus procedures, in some cases delaying executions by as much as 20 years. Abu-Jamal, for example, was sentenced to die in 1982, but has managed to fend off the gallows through appeals for 17 years, and is now seeking a federal habeas corpus review of his case.

"Any criminal justice system has to have some semblance of finalty," says Bob Graci, a top attorney in the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office. "And you have to have that particularly in death penalty cases, which used to go on ad nauseum. For the survivors of the victims of these crimes you have to have an end point."

Graci, who has worked on habeas reform legislation for the NAAG, says that while the U.S. Supreme Court has been clamping down on frivolous habeas writs since the 1980s, the 1996 law was still needed. "Congress heard the cries of the states for effective habeas corpus reform."

He argues that federal habeas corpus appeals are not Constitutionally guaranteed and that current measures only bring things back into balance after years of expansion of the powers of federal courts to reverse state court decisions.

Leaving It Up to the States

Concerns about the Effective Death Penalty Act hinge on state courts' high rate of errors, and on the fact that state judges and local prosecutors are often vulnerable to political pressure.

Consider this statistic. In the period between 1980 and 1996, 40 percent of the capital punishment cases were found on appeal to have serious constitutional errors. Peter Neufeld, an attorney with the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City, says that while there are no hard statistics, there is no reason to think that the proportion of errors in non-capital cases is lower, both in terms of state court mistakes and prosecutorial misconduct.

"The problem," says Burr, the defense attorney, "is that the quality of state courts is much lower than the federal courts."

Burr notes that state court judges, and even appellate judges in many states, especially in the Southeast and Midwest, are elected to terms of office, and are thus very sensitive to community pressure. Federal judges, appointed by presidents and approved by Congress, are seated for life, and are thus much more independent.

State prosecutors are also elected. "So you tend to get more overzealous prosecutions, hidden evidence and things, at the state level," says Burr. "Many state judges were prosecutors before they became judges, so they tend to show deference towards the prosecution in criminal cases. Here in Texas, for instance, if a judge rules against the district attorney too often, the DA will run someone against him the next election."

Of course, the most terrifying impact of the severe limitation on federal habeas corpus appeals is that innocent people on death row are now often unable to get a federal court to consider their evidence. And yet there is good reason to doubt that all those people condemned to die really are guilty.

In addition to the statistics cited by Neufeld, more than half of the death penalty cases reexamined in Illinois in recent years have been found to be in error - a staggering figure that led the governor to recently place a moratorium on executions. In many, new evidence, including DNA samples and new witnesses, have proven the innocence of people who had been slated to die. "There's nothing uniquely wrong with the Illinois court system," says O'Brien of the Kansas City Public Interest Litigation Center. "They just do a better job in Illinois of preserving evidence after a trial, so people have been able to go back and look at it again. There are probably just as many wrongful convictions in other states."