Setting New Standards

The National Habeas Institute will create leverage for the habeas bar by collecting and articulating guidelines for best practices. The Habeas Institute will establish a coalition of experts who will expand the set of existing capital defense standards to create a set of standards that focus on the role of habeas corpus in capital cases. We will begin with the capital defense standards because they are the only existing guidelines that address the role of habeas lawyers. After the coalition adopts standards for capital lawyers, the National Habeas Institute will use the same coalition model to develop related habeas standards for non-capital criminal defense attorneys and immigration lawyers. By focusing on these three fields, the new standards will expose the legal gaps through which people confined in the U.S. tend to fall.