 Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and welcome to my blog. Today's topic has to do with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to accept a writ of certiority. They call it cert. They accepted a case that they're going to hear and rule on and this particular case is Martinez versus Ryan. Now this is an Arizona case and here's why it's important. Luis Martinez is the defendant and who has now brought this case before the Supreme Court and Ryan was the judge that originally heard the case. What's going on is that he had a trial and he felt that his attorney was ineffective, ineffective assistance to a counsel. They call this an Arizona Rule 32 post-conviction relief petition. He brought this forward with a new attorney who filed the PCR and this attorney just said, no, there's no issues, no colorable claim. Well that attorney, according to Martinez, was also ineffective and he said, look, I'm entitled to the same standard as the trial attorney. He must be effective and competent and I should have the same standard with the PCR attorney. Well, believe it or not, in Arizona it's not necessarily that that's the standard and this hasn't been heard before so the Supreme Court has accepted this. Now SCOTUS blog which stands for Supreme Court of the United States blog has called this cert grant, quote, a big deal in habeas law, unquote. Now habeas corpus is when you throw everything that's occurred and say, look, here's everything that's occurred till now, there's got to be some relief and this gentleman deserves to be released but you usually have to wait till the very end after all remedies have been exhausted before you can have habeas relief. So this is actually allowing a claim early on in the appellate action saying my PCR attorney was ineffective. Why is this important in real time? Because in real time a PCR usually happens years before habeas happens. And appeals happen years before habeas. So this could actually speed up getting somebody out of custody who had a really bad attorney. Obviously, anytime you use an attorney on appellate work, PCR work, or habeas they have to know what they're doing. They should be a certified specialist in criminal law. They should be avi-rated. You should check all their credentials. But I think this is a big deal in this case. I hope that the Supreme Court agrees with me on this that they should mandate effective counsel at the PCR level. But that's what I think. Tell me what you think.