Skip to main content

Woman Seeks to Clear Her Name With Rarely Granted Writ

By

On Monday, The American Lawyer posted an article on its website about Miriam Moskowitz, who was convicted in 1950 on a charge of conspiracy in a case involving the theft of U.S. atomic secrets. Moskowitz has always denied that she had any knowledge of the espionage plot between her boss, Abraham Brothman, and his associate Harry Gold. In 2008, evidence uncovered in a judicial review showed that Gold’s testimony at trial conflicted with his earlier statements to the FBI. Moskowitz, now 98 years old, is attempting to use this newly discovered evidence to clear her name.   

The legal process by which she is doing so is known as a petition for a writ of error coram nobis. The Latin phrase coram nobis means “before us,” and refers to errors of fact (not of law) before the court. Coram nobis petitions are sometimes used to challenge the results of cases in which evidence was withheld by prosecutors. The writ is rarely granted in criminal cases, and has been abolished altogether in federal civil cases. (See Rule 60(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.) One famous instance of its use occurred in 1983, when a U.S. District Court granted the writ to overturn the conviction of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who had been convicted of evading internment during World War II. (The conviction had previously been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).)

For more on writs of error coram nobis and the history of their use in U.S. courts, see this 2009 article from the BYU Law Review.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more