Justices Rule for Inmate After Mailroom Mix-Up.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that an Alabama death row inmate who missed a filing deadline thanks to a mix-up in the mailroom of a prominent New York law firm must be given another chance. . .

Justice Scalia acknowledged the majority’s “understandable sense of frustration.” But he said the majority opinion in the case, Maples v. Thomas, No. 10-63, had provided a road map to other death row inmates. “The trick will be to allege,” Justice Scalia wrote, “not that counsel was ineffective, but rather that the counsel’s ineffectiveness demonstrates that he was not a genuinely representative agent.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote that the decision was limited and straightforward.

“In these circumstances,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, “no just system would lay the default at Maples’s death-cell door.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/us/cory-r-maples-must-be-given-second-chance-after-mailroom-mix-up-justices-rule.html?hp