Few cases better illustrate the right-left divide on the current U.S. Supreme Court than the case of Keith Bowles. Bowles was convicted in 1999 of beating a man to death and was sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison. In 2003, while Bowles was seeking federal habeas corpus relief, the district judge gave him 17 days to reopen the filing period for his notice of appeal. He duly filed 16 days later.
The problem is that, under a congressional statute and under the federal rules of appellate procedure, the judge was only allowed to grant Bowles 14 days, not 17. Because a federal judge made an error, and Bowles’ lawyer relied on that error, Bowles lost his last chance to challenge his conviction in federal court. Bowles argued before the Supreme Court that he should benefit from the traditional rule of equitable tolling, which permits time limits to be extended to alleviate unfairness or hardship to a litigant. In Bowles v. Russell (2007), the Court’s five-member conservative bloc disagreed: Rules are rules, they said. In fact, rules were rules, since the majority had to overturn two of its own long-standing precedents to make sure Bowles lost.
