Widening the Gateway

The Supreme Court makes it a little bit easier for potentially innocent inmates to get their cases heard.

OF ALL THE cases of possibly innocent people in state prisons, Paul House's hardly seems the most compelling. Convicted and sentenced to die in Tennessee for the murder of a woman two decades ago, Mr. House has mustered some considerable new evidence suggesting his innocence. But his claim is hardly overpowering. Ironically, that is exactly what makes the Supreme Court's decision yesterday allowing federal review of his conviction significant.

Oftentimes, serious legal deficiencies in state convictions, including capital convictions, escape federal review because of technical errors that prevented them from being raised in state courts first. Normally, the federal courts' attitude is that this is the inmate's tough luck. In recent years, however, the courts have acknowledged that in cases where an inmate has a particularly strong claim of innocence, those procedural barriers sometimes have to give way to prevent a miscarriage of justice. Yet clearing this hurdle requires an especially demanding showing -- so in practice, it doesn't offer much hope. The question in Mr. House's case was whether his showing of innocence was strong enough to let him proceed with a challenge that would otherwise be barred. The court voted 5 to 3 that it was.

Mr. House's claim seems powerful on its face. He has produced DNA evidence that semen stains left on the victim's clothing were not his but her husband's. He has offered indications that the victim's blood left on his pants might be the result of lab spillage, and not from the crime scene. And two witnesses have come forward -- years after the fact -- alleging that the victim's husband confessed to the crime. Yet as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued in dissent -- joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- significant evidence of Mr. House's guilt remains, and the judge who considered his new evidence up close did not find it persuasive. In other words, to let Mr. House into court, the justices have had to widen significantly the gateway for review in such cases.

But this is not, as the dissenters imply, a problem; rather, it is a good development and overdue. It does not mean that inmates will go free on inconclusive showings of innocence; Mr. House still has a long way to go to get his conviction overturned. It means only that inmates who can raise a serious factual question about their guilt should have a somewhat easier time getting into the courthouse in the first place. Given how many innocents have been wrongly convicted and later freed from death row and lengthy prison terms, opening the door for review makes a great deal of sense.