To understand how the Effective Death Penalty Act came to pass, it's necessary to look back to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

This was the worst act of domestic terrorism in modern American history, rivaling in its impact on American opinion the bombings of the American Embassy and Marine compound in Lebanon during the Reagan administration.

In the wake of the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building, which killed 169 people, the American public wanted action. The resulting Anti-Terrorism Act, drawn up at a time when people still thought the nation might be under attack by foreign terrorists, was Congress' hasty response.

But after the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, the Republican majority in Congress took action to make certain that he got the punishment he deserved - and quickly, without the delay of a federal appeal - by tacking on to the bill an amendment called the Effective Death Penalty Act.

The act put almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of habeas corpus, a time-honored right in English common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, and even before in Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Meaning "show me the body" in Latin, and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, habeas corpus means any citizen imprisoned by the state has a right to go before a court to have the legality of that imprisonment reviewed. In 1867, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal judges had the absolute right to review any state court criminal case to ensure that the quality of justice would not vary from state to state, and that everyone's rights would be equally protected.

Now federal judges no longer have that blanket authority. They are, in fact, required by the act to assume that the facts of a case -- often as determined by the very state court judge whose decision is being questioned -- are correct.

-- Dave Lindorff