Last week, in an otherwise routine orders list from the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor went out of her way to highlight the denied petition of one self-represented Louisiana state prisoner with a remarkable story.

Louie M. Schexnayder Jr., who is serving life in prison for a 1994 murder, had argued his nonunanimous jury conviction more than 20 years ago never received proper judicial review on appeal due to a state court scheme exposed in a Louisiana state court staffer's suicide note.

Under a controversial law that at least one U.S. presidential candidate has proposed repealing, federal courts must defer to state court decisions on post-conviction proceedings unless they violated or unreasonably applied previously decided Supreme Court precedent. As a result, federal judges have refused to entertain Schexnayder's claims that his appeals were denied due process.

Eve Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on post-conviction justice, said Schexnayder's case highlights how deference to state courts can sometimes prevent proper review of pro se cases.

"These cases tend to be relatively low visibility and incredibly high-volume," she said. "So you're invariably going to find pockets of places where individuals are cutting corners."

One such pocket, according to the 2007 suicide note of a former administrator in the state's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was Gretna, Louisiana, where appellate judges summarily dismissed all pro se prisoner petitions for habeas corpus, a form of post-conviction review, over a 13-year period by having nonjudge staffers write boilerplate denials and then rubber-stamping the orders.

Meeting notes cited in a different case confirmed judges had agreed to have only one judge oversee pro se habeas petitions, in violation of the state's requirement that panels of three examine each petition.

After the suicide note's discovery, the Louisiana Supreme Court allowed judges on the same circuit court to re-review 299 petitions from people like Schexnayder, who'd claimed that the staffer's confession revealed their initial habeas corpus bids had been illegally ignored.

None of those petitioners won relief, but Schexnayder's Supreme Court petition argued a federal court should consider whether the jurists who conducted the re-review process could have been biased.

Justice Sotomayor wrote that, due to some technical problems in Schexnayder's argument, she did not dissent from the court's refusal to take the case. However, the justice said the re-review process was something she expects "lower federal courts will examine."

"The Louisiana Supreme Court approved a procedure whereby a three-judge panel — drawn from the same pool of Court of Appeal judges who had allegedly summarily rejected pro se filings — would re-review hundreds of pro se submissions that had been dismissed without consideration," Justice Sotomayor wrote.

"The re-review procedure ... raises serious due process concerns," she added.

The denied petition marks a grim end to a legal battle Schexnayder has fought since 1999, largely alone and with some help from jailhouse lawyers at Louisiana's Angola State Prison. It wasn't until earlier this year that his petition, and an amicus brief by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, inspired Emily Washington and Jim Craig of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center to take him on as a client.

Both attorneys cast doubt on Justice Sotomayor's expectation that Louisiana's old pro se scandal will ever be revisited, considering the challenge of even bringing a habeas corpus petition from prison and without counsel.

"When you understand what it took for Louie to keep this challenge alive up until now, it's truly remarkable," Washington said. "Unfortunately, I would be surprised if there are other impacted people who are positioned to have a federal court now review these state court dismissals. I don't have a lot of hope that such a case is still out there."

Craig said the case also highlights problems with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which made it harder for state prisoners to challenge their convictions in federal court. Under the law and relevant high court rulings, prisoners like Schexnayder are not entitled to an attorney or investigator when challenging state post-conviction proceedings.

"Louie is not exactly allowed to walk around and interview witnesses, and he can't even get the record in his own case himself, because Louisiana's public records law literally excludes him and other prisoners from their definition of a 'person' entitled to files," Craig said. "And obviously he doesn't have the research capability that lawyers have."

At the core of Schexnayder's case is his conviction for a 1994 murder. The conviction, which came by the kind of nonunanimous jury vote that Louisiana voters abolished in a 2018 referendum, followed an initial mistrial.

From the start, Schexnayder raised concerns about his court-appointed counsel. But after unsuccessfully appealing his conviction at Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and at the state's high court, Schexnayder no longer had the right to counsel at all — Supreme Court precedent holds that the right expires after the first appeal.

According to Primus, there is "a whole bucket of claims" that can't be raised until after one's first appeal, including ineffective assistance of counsel or prosecutorial misconduct.

"All those kinds of claims would be raised in state post-conviction processes, but the problem is, you don't get a right to a lawyer," she said. "You have to reinvestigate your own case and raise it from within your prison cell — which is obviously next to impossible to do."

On his own, Schexnayder brought ineffective assistance of counsel claims, among others, in a state habeas corpus petition, only to be denied once again at the state's Fifth Circuit Court and Supreme Court. A subsequent federal court bid similarly failed.

What looked like a dead-end case, however, was revived after the 2007 suicide note exposed how Judge Edward A. Dufresne Jr., the Fifth Circuit Court's then-chief judge who passed away in 2010, had signed off on thousands of sham habeas corpus denials — including Schexnayder's.

After press coverage of the note, the Fifth Circuit asked the Louisiana Supreme Court for permission to have five judges, not including Dufresne, re-review 299 petitions from prisoners who'd raised concerns about the alleged sham. The state high court agreed in 2008's State v. Cordero ruling, with one judge dissenting due to the potential for an "appearance of impropriety."

None of the re-reviewed cases were granted relief, including Schexnayder's, but his Supreme Court petition argued that the re-review process was tainted by potential bias.

"If the sham adjudications were revealed to have prolonged wrongful incarcerations, those errors would have made a stronger case for judicial discipline," Schexnayder's pro se petition states. "The Cordero panels were thus put in the position of imperiling their immediate colleagues' positions and livelihoods."

Unfortunately for Schexnayder, the 1996 law known as AEDPA affords a high level of deference to state court post-conviction proceedings. Passed with broad bipartisan support following the Oklahoma City bombings, the law was an effort to stem the rising tide of federal habeas corpus petitions that followed Supreme Court rulings expanding procedural protections to state prisoners.

Craig noted that before AEDPA, habeas petitioners in capital cases — a significant chunk of all habeas petitioners — had won federal writs of habeas corpus roughly 40% of the time.

"After AEDPA, that grant rate dropped dramatically," Craig said. "You have a situation now where there's less of a deterrent effect on state court judges to get things right."

In Schexnayder's case, a federal judge dismissed his bid for federal habeas corpus review on the grounds that AEDPA required deference to the Fifth Circuit's re-review process, no matter if it was conducted by judges who were complicit in the alleged scheme.

A federal appeals court refused to revisit the ruling, and from "reading between the lines," Craig said that Justice Sotomayor's note on the case suggested the high court took issue with the way Schexnayder framed the crux of his petition.

"I think we can infer that the court was concerned that Louie did not properly raise the issue of AEDPA deference," he said.

Primus said Schexnayder's case highlights a concern that scholars and judges have raised with the law, which U.S. presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed repealing due to the procedural hurdles it creates for those protesting their innocence.

"It is really unfortunate that, when there is an injustice as great as this injustice, the courts will refuse to entertain the claim because of some procedural morass," Primus said.

For Schexnayder, the justices' refusal to take his case means he will almost certainly die in Angola. Craig and Washington, however, said they're not giving up on his cause.

"I think most people would conclude that you're at the end of the road," Washington said. "But we're still looking at whether that has to be true — and not just for Louie, and for other individuals in this specific situation, but also for others who are seeking substantive federal review of their convictions and sentences."

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--Editing by Katherine Rautenberg.