Joe Biden: “this is the first of a series of several amendments relating to habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is probably the most time…”

“this is the first of a series of several amendments relating to habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is probably the most time honored phrase in our English jurisprudential criminal justice system, referred to as the Great Writ. But it is not very well understood by a vast majority of people including many lawyers. I say at the outset here that one of the things we are going to hear today--we are going to hear a great deal about how the system is abused. We are going to be told that time and again. We will see charts. We have been seeing these charts for years that show that a man or woman, in almost every case it has been a man, who has been sentenced to death, because of a series of frivolous appeals and successive habeas corpus petitions has remained in a prison cell and alive for--some of the examples of 10, 12, 14, 18 years after having committed the crime and having been convicted by a jury of their peers and having exhausted their appeals--after having committed a heinous crime.…”