Its already difficult to challenge a sentence or conviction in federal court and the Supreme Court just made it even harder on Monday. In a 6-3 decision in Shinn v. Ramirez, the court ruled that two people who were sentenced to death were not entitled to present new evidence in federal court showing that they had ineffective lawyers at trial.

The decision increases the likelihood that people who are innocent or otherwise undeserving of their sentences will remain incarcerated, or even face execution.

As a result of the courts ruling, death sentences remain intact for Barry Lee Jones, a man with a credible innocence claim, and for David Martinez Ramirez, who may have an intellectual disability that would disqualify him from the death penalty.

More broadly, the court set a new precedent that chokes off an important avenue for people arguing they were poorly served by bad lawyers. If an individual has an ineffective lawyer at trial and then subsequently ends up with another ineffective lawyer who fails to argue that their client had ineffective counsel at trial, that individual may have no way of ever raising the issue in court.

Federal habeas review, through which a federal court can review the legality of an individuals incarceration, is supposed to be a safeguard against unfair outcomes in state court, but the Supreme Court has increasingly chipped away at those protections. The stakes are particularly high for people facing capital punishment. Despite the common misconception that people on death row represent the worst of the worst, they are usually people who have dealt with abuse, poverty, intellectual disabilities or untreated mental illness. They often rely on court-appointed attorneys, many of whom are ill-equipped to handle death penalty litigation.

This decision is perverse. It is illogical, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The Courts decision thus reduces to rubble many habeas petitioners Sixth Amendment rights to the effective assistance of counsel, Sotomayor continued.

The Supreme Court ruling in Shinn v. Ramirez involves the separate cases of Jones and Ramirez, both of whom were convicted and sentenced to death in Arizona. Both men received abysmal legal assistance during their trials. During state post-conviction proceedings the time to raise ineffective assistance of counsel claims both of their lawyers failed to do so. Because of this, Jones and Ramirez sought relief in federal court.

There are extensive procedural barriers to raising issues in federal court that have not already been raised in state court. But a 2012 Supreme Court decision called Martinez v. Ryan created a narrow exception for people like Jones and Ramirez, who had ineffective lawyers at both trial and state post-conviction proceedings.

For Jones, this meant the chance to present evidence of his innocence, which led to his conviction being overturned in 2018 after hed spent 23 years on death row.

Jones was accused of raping and killing his girlfriends 4-year-old daughter, Rachel, who died in 1994 following a rupture in her small intestine. The state claimed that Jones had assaulted her the day before her death, while she was in Jones care. Had Joness trial lawyers done basic investigative work, they would have learned that it was extremely unlikely Rachels abdominal injury could have become fatal so quickly and that there was no solid evidence she was raped, as the Intercept has previously reported . But the jury heard none of this evidence and convicted Jones, who was then sentenced to death.

Under Arizona law, individuals cannot raise ineffective assistance of counsel claims on direct appeal, the first review after a conviction. Instead, they have to wait until their state post-conviction review. Unlike during trial and direct appeal, there is no guaranteed right to a lawyer at this stage.

Jones was appointed a lawyer who was not technically qualified to represent him in post-conviction proceedings, as the lawyer later admitted. When the lawyer moved to appoint an investigator, he did so under the wrong legal statute and the request was denied. The lawyer failed to argue that Jones received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial in Jones petition for post-conviction relief, and the petition was denied.

It wasnt until Jones reached the federal habeas stage of litigation that he received competent lawyers, who, with the benefit of the 2012 Martinez decision, were able to introduce new evidence and get Jones conviction overturned.