Christian conservatives insisted not long ago that the government should err on the side of life and, therefore, Terri Schiavo's feeding tube should be reinserted until a full review could be made in the federal courts. If they really believed this, why don't they insist on the same for prisoners on death row?

Stephen Bright and Virginia Sloan of the Southern Center for Human Rights write:

Said Senator Mel Martinez, R-Fla., "We will simply be allowing the federal judge to give one last review, one last look in a case that has so many questions, that has so many anxieties, and that will provide us the kind of assurance before the ultimate fate of this woman is decided to know that we did all we could do and that every last measure of review was given her, just like it would have been given to a death row inmate convicted and sentenced to die."

However, death row inmates are not given "every last measure of [federal] review." In 1996, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which severely restricts federal court power to review constitutional claims by inmates sentenced to death by state courts. Federal review, Congress said, would constitute disrespect for state court decisions, even when the claim involves the federal, not state, Constitution.

In a death row inmate's case, a federal court must defer to the state courts and may overrule them only rarely-when it finds a state court judgment was not only wrong, but unreasonably wrong. This is a dramatic restriction on federal courts' ability to protect an inmate's federal constitutional rights. ... In capital cases, the law prevents federal courts from considering any issue not raised and decided in state court, no matter how important the claim or why it was not presented.

For example, Gary Graham, a Texas death row inmate, presented evidence that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence. The Texas courts refused to hear the issue on technical procedural grounds, and the federal courts were unable to intervene. President Bush said of the Schiavo case, "it is wisest to always err on the side of life," but then-Governor Bush allowed Graham's execution even though no court had determined the merits of his constitutional issue.

The risk of error in capital murder cases is not insignificant. Columbia University did a study recently showing that federal courts (prior to the AEDPA) discovered serious constitutional violates in two-thirds of cases where state courts had already upheld a death sentence. That's a lot of errors which, today, aren't being reviewed and reversed by federal judges.

There is no principle among conservative Christians which entails erring on the side of life. They only raise it when it suits their authoritarian agenda; otherwise, they don't give "life" a second thought unless it's their own.

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