ABSTRACT
On May 5, 1992, the day after children came back to school in lacerated Los Angeles, a front page center article in the New York Times showed a dark child drawing houses aflame and people assaulted. They were his memories of the still smoldering riots that followed a local court's acquittal of four white policemen who brutalized Rodney King. On the same front page, at the far right, another legal decision made the news. The Supreme Court had decided to overturn the guarantees for fair hearings established by the 1966 amendment to habeas corpus. Acknowledging the possibilities of error, ignorance, or bias, that amendment used to entitle state prisoners to a retrial at the federal level, if "the material facts were not adequately developed at the state-court hearing." Refining the law enhanced it dramatically: "Of the 400 habeas corpus petitions granted each year, more than 40% of all the death penalty cases were overturned." 1 The new decision of May 4, 1992, Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes, ruled out those guarantees when it found no reason to retry a Cuban convict of manslaughter, even though his lawyer had failed to offer crucial evidence. Instead he offered Tamayo-Reyes a no contest plea, so badly translated that the defendant did not understand what he was signing.
