26 October 2005

For Me? You Shouldn't Have!

Well, I got my very first federal habeas today. Joy of Joys.

It's nice and typed, unlike a State habeas, and uses a lot of language which reads like I would have imagined lawyers wrote when I was in the 7th grade: "Therefore the heretofore said fact thusly set forth previously . . ." And apparently I did a lot of things ironically. i.e. "Said counsel ironically chose to be imcompetent" (repeated in multiple variations).

I don't think I should discuss the meat of the accusations but I'll leave you part of an actual quote:

"In the instant case subjudice, Petitioner, while raising various substantive claims of the underlying judgment being imposed without judicial jurisdiction and otherwise subject to collateral attack, also configurates the claims herein upon the ineffective assistance of counsel forum . . ."

For those of you who are wondering, configurate is actually a verb. It means "to give or assign a form to." Subjudice means "before a judge or court." I'd seen subjudice before (although probably not since law school), but until I looked it up I didn't really believe configurate was a word.

Petitioner obviously had a jail-house lawyer do this for him. How do I know this? Because Petitioner (previously Client) is actually quite bright and probably would have written a better document if he'd done it himself.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you're on the receiving end of a Strickland claim?

Ken Lammers said...

Yes.

For those of you who don't know what Strickland is all about, this type of claim states that the attorney was so ineffective as counsel that the defendant was without counsel as guaranteed under the 6th Amendment AND the errors made were so egregious that they prejudiced the defense and deprived the defendant of a fair trial.