This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 26, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What are the proper limits on your ability to challenge a conviction?

What if it's apparent that the government did not your ability to challenge a conviction.

What if it's apparent that the government did not prove an element of the case, and you

simply should not have been convicted?

The Supreme Court has weighed in with regard to some of those convictions,

Kato's J. Schweiker discusses the case of Jones v Hendrix.

The main law at issue here was in response to what?

So the main statute at issue in this case is the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,

which was passed largely in response to the Oklahoma City bombing a year prior.

And the act does a number of different things, but one of the main things that it does is especially

relevant for this case is it limits in a number of ways the ability of prisoners to bring

collateral attacks on their underlying criminal convictions after they have

been convicted and exhausted their appeals.

So in the normal course of affairs, you know, a prisoner might be go to trial,

convicted, they can raise direct appeals to that conviction,

but if they lose those appeals, they still have the ability to bring post-conviction

collateral claims saying, hey, you know, there was something unlawful about this underlying

conviction.

But what the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act or

Edpa, as it's usually called, does, is it says, as a general rule, prisoners cannot bring

...