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Testa, Crain, And The Constitutional Right To Collateral Relief, Carlos Manuel Vázquez, Stephen I. Vladeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Montgomery v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held that state prisoners have a constitutional right to relief from continued imprisonment if the prisoner’s conviction or sentence contravenes a new substantive rule of constitutional law. Specifically, the Court held that prisoners with such claims are constitutionally entitled to collateral relief in state court—at least if the state courts are open to other claims for collateral relief on the ground that their continued imprisonment is unlawful. In our article, The Constitutional Right to Collateral Post-Conviction Relief, we argued that, under two lines of Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Supremacy …

The Constitutional Right To Collateral Post-Conviction Review, Carlos Manuel Vázquez, Stephen I. Vladeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For years, the prevailing academic and judicial wisdom has held that, between them, Congress and the Supreme Court have rendered post- conviction habeas review all but a dead letter. But in its January 2016 decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court may have dramatically upended that understanding in holding—for the first time—that there are at least some cases in which the Constitution itself creates a right to collateral post-conviction review, i.e., cases in which a prisoner seeks to enforce retroactively a “new rule” of substantive constitutional law under the familiar doctrine of Teague v. Lane.

On the …