“The extended hearing in Jones is particularly poignant,” he wrote by way of example. Ostensibly to assess the cause and bias under Martinez, the court ordered a seven-day hearing with testimony from no fewer than 10 witnesses, including defense counsel, post-conviction defense counsel, the principal investigator, three forensic pathologists, an emergency medicine and trauma specialist, a biomechanics and functional human anatomy expert, and a crime scene and bloodstain pattern analyst.”
“This massive re-appeal of Jones’ guilt,” added Judge Thomas, “is clearly not what Martinez had in mind.”
Judge Sotomayor replied that the hearing was necessary because Mr Jones’ lawyers had been inadequate. “Far from an inappropriate and ‘wholesale re-processing of Jones’ guilt,'” she wrote, “the court hearing was wide-ranging precisely because the collapse of the adversarial system in Jones’s case was so blatant.”
The Supreme Court decision, Judge Sotomayor added, “will see many people convicted of violations of the Sixth Amendment incarcerated or even executed without any meaningful opportunity to defend their right to a lawyer.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Judges Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority of Judge Thomas. Judges Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Judge Sotomayor’s disagreement.
Robert M. Loeb, who represented Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Jones on the Supreme Court, expressed disappointment with the decision.
“The court’s ruling leaves the fundamental constitutional right to try legal counsel without an effective enforcement mechanism in these circumstances,” he said in a statement. “The decision misinterprets the federal statute, produces unsustainable results that Congress never anticipated, and amounts to an attack on fundamental justice in the criminal justice system.”