The Demise of Habeas Corpus and the Rise of Qualified Immunity: The Court's Ever Increasing Limitations on the Development and Enforcement of Constitutional Rights and Some Particularly Unfortunate Consequences

The collapse of habeas corpus as a remedy for even the most glaring of constitutional violations ranks among the greater wrongs of our legal era. Once hailed as the Great Writ, and still feted with all the standard rhetorical flourishes, habeas corpus has been transformed over the past two decades from a vital guarantor of liberty into an instrument for ratifying the power of state courts to disregard the protections of the Constitution. Along with so many other judicial tools meant to safeguard the powerless, enforce constitutional rights, and hold the government accountable, habeas has been slowly eroded by a series of recent Supreme Court rulings that aim ultimately at eliminating that judicial method of protecting individual rights. In this age of calls for the near-total abolition of habeas and scathing rebukes of judges who fail to toe the not-so-hidden party line, it is easy to lose sight of how we got here.

It is convenient to blame it on inevitable historical or jurisprudential trends, or to insist that it followed necessarily from passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). One can then proclaim that there is no reasonable alternative to the Supreme Court’s present construction of that statute, even though any participant in our habeas regime would have to agree that it resembles a twisted labyrinth of deliberately crafted legal obstacles that make it as difficult for habeas petitioners to succeed in pursuing the Writ as it would be for a Supreme Court Justice to strike out Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle in succession—even with the Chief Justice calling balls and strikes.