A Supreme Court ruling will make it more difficult for prisoners to be released, disallowing new evidence to be presented in federal court to support arguments that state lawyers did not adequately represent them. The vote was 6-3 along party lines, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion for the case dealing with consideration of new information in the cases of death row inmates David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones of Arizona, years after they had already been convicted. He ruled that federal courts should only be able to take into consideration evidence that was already …
