In addition to the Violent Crime Control Act, Bill Clinton signed two other major pieces of anti-crime legislation. 1996 brought the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which legal journalist Lincoln Caplan calls “surely one of the worst statutes ever passed by Congress and signed into law by a president.” As Caplan explains, “the heart of the law is a provision saying that, even when a state court misapplies the Constitution, a defendant cannot necessarily have his day in federal court.”

AEDPA was a political response to the Oklahoma City bombing and the perception that death row inmates were given unduly generous helpings of appellate procedure. It drastically accelerated executions, creating what judge Stephen Reinhardt called “a twisted labyrinth of deliberately crafted legal obstacles” that prevent death row inmates from raising issues successfully on appeal.

AEDPA thereby inhibited the ability of judges to fix unsound convictions, and examine the substantive rather than procedural issues in a case. With the Supreme Court having interpreted AEDPA’s requirements literally, according to Caplan, the law “has become an enormous source of frustration on the federal bench.”