High court rules against Alabama killer

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled against an Alabama death row inmate today, declaring that he missed a deadline for challenging his conviction.

Alabama officials had asked the justices to take the case of Daniel Siebert, who is sentenced to death for killing a Talledega woman during a robbery in February 1986.

In a separate murder case, Siebert was scheduled to have been executed on October 25th, but a federal appeals court in Atlanta temporarily blocked the execution.

In the case the justices decided Alabama courts ruled that Siebert had missed a deadline for challenging his conviction at the state level in the killing of Linda Ann Jarman.

Siebert was also convicted in the strangulation deaths of Jarman's next-door neighbor, Sherri Weathers, and Weathers' two young sons. Weathers was a student at the Alabama School for the Deaf and had been dating Siebert. Jarman was killed the same night.


Read more: http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=7313591&nav=menu33_3

---

The Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 sets a one-year deadline for filing such petitions but the deadline is figured from the end of his direct state appeal.

Since the law was enacted after his conviction, his deadline was one year after the law was enacted in 1996. That still meant that his federal habeas petition was filed four years late.


More on the "The Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996" here.
http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/96-499.htm

this is about life for god's sake!

I guess there is a special place in hell for people who deny appeals to a death row inmate because of procedural issues.

Damn, what a fucked up country.

Do they go to hell too?

I think we need to remember who did the worse thing in this situation.

Procedural issues, by the way, are called 'obeying the law.'

on prosecuting someone for murder, but there is a time limit on filing appeals. I've never understood that, especially in death penalty cases.

It make take months or years to find a suspect in the murder, but once a verdict has been decided, the case is there for any lawyer to read and find an error with the way it was tried.

The problem is that there are serious problems with the death penalty. Death is final. I'm willing to err on the side of caution and let the convicted work though the process without procedural hurdles. Forget about the barbaric nature if capital punishment and at least let a defendent exhaust his appeals.

Fry the bastard.

That after he took the lives of 4 people, he wasn't man enough to attack the cops who came to arrest him.

/end :sarcasm:



And yes, I did post this so that I could get a rise out fo the anti death penalty advocates.

aren't we?

for no other reason than the odds of them ever being paid are pretty slim as one major capital case can bankrupt the public defender system in any given jurisdiction.