Gateway To Justice: Constitutional Claims To Actual Innocence

Blind faith in the justice system might lead one to assume that a trial in which constitutional rights are preserved would necessarily result in a just verdict. In other words, if a court protects the accused’s constitutional rights, then no innocent man will ever be wrongly convicted. As a result of new technology (especially DNA testing), however, it is well recognized that innocent men and women are recurrently incarcerated and convicted even in the absence of factual or constitutional error. For the first time in history, the Supreme Court of the United States has come close to recognizing this reality. On August 17, 2009, Troy Anthony Davis’s freestanding innocence claim, unattached to any constitutional error or unreasonable application of federal law, was remanded by the United States Supreme Court to the Georgia district court for hearing and determination. The Supreme Court, however, did not release the district court from the restrictions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which requires Davis to show that the state court adjudication was based