TJ Cox: “My amendment, which I am calling the Harris amendment, provides that a habeas writ will not be granted when State court…”

“My amendment, which I am calling the Harris amendment, provides that a habeas writ will not be granted when State court decision reasonably interprets and Federal law reasonably interprets the facts of the case and reasonably applies the law to the facts, or to put it simply, State decisions that are reasonable on the law and the facts will be upheld by a habeas review. The purpose of my amendment is to prevent the use of endless appeals to frustrate the punishment of already convicted criminals, including first degree murders. We do not have a Federal Criminal Code. We have, in chief, a State criminal justice system. When one commits murder, rape, robbery, and so on, all of these are offenses against State law. Our Federal criminal jurisprudence is a gloss on that State criminal justice system. The Federal procedural rules, in fact, operate in many cases as a frustration to the State system. So we find that there are egregious cases, and all too many of them, of convicted first degree murderers who have run all of their appeals in the State criminal justice system, who then get another bite, and another bite at the apple, seemingly endlessly in the Federal system, and who have been able, through the abuse of the habeas device, to postpone their executions, seemingly indefinitely.”