Political Quotes

“There are at least three avenues that people sentenced to the death penalty can travel. Of course, they have their natural State appeals. Then there is a habeas corpus procedure within the State, and then the Federal habeas corpus procedure. People that are on death row and their attorneys are experts at maximizing these appeals, and in many cases, going back, and not necessarily appealing the same issues, but raising new issues each time to delay, as we all know, and we heard so often on the campaign trail from our constituents, delaying it 15, 20 years or more. That was probably, again, one of the major complaints that I heard. As I look there on the Contract that you are checking off, on Number 2, we are getting very close, because today not only did we work on the exclusionary rule, and yesterday on victims' compensation, but we did pass this fairly severe modification, changes to the habeas corpus proceedings. The two things I talked about were limiting the numbers of these appeals and the timeliness of them, and we did exactly that today.”