Title: Is Guilt Dispositive? Federal Habeas after Martinez
Abstract: Federal habeas review of criminal convictions is not supposed to be a second opportunity to adjudge guilt. It has been said, by Oliver Wendall Holmes among others, that the sole question on federal habeas is whether the prisoner’s constitutional rights were violated. By the early 1970s, however, scholars criticized this rights-based view of habeas and sounded the alarm that post-conviction review had become too far removed from questions of innocence. Most famously, in 1970 Judge Friendly criticized the breadth of habeas corpus by posing a single question: Is innocence irrelevant? In his view habeas review that focused exclusively on questions of rights in isolation from questions of innocence was misguided.