Hugo Black

“ Petitioner has not raised any claims which indicate in the slightest that he has been convicted of a crime of which he is innocent. At the most he has asserted a desire to review the record to find some technical legal point which he can argue to a court as a basis for release from confinement. He has already had one chance to make such arguments on direct appeal, and he lost that battle. I do not think he needs a transcript to know whether he was convicted erroneously or whether some new circumstances have arisen that now show a fatal constitutional error in the prior proceedings. ”

“ There certainly is no constitutional requirement that a State must continue to supply convicted defendants trial records to enable them to raise the same old challenges to their convictions again and again and again. There is not a word or a suggestion in the whole record in this case that demonstrates or even intimates that any new events have occurred since petitioner's 1961 appeal which could under any possible circumstances justify even a shadowy argument that petitioner was not guilty of the murder he was convicted of having committed. ”

“ Petitioner and one Joe Pollard were convicted of murder in 1960 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Pollard received a trial transcript and when he refused to turn it over to petitioner for his use in preparing an appeal, the State Attorney General's Office loaned a copy to petitioner's appellate counsel. The California District Court of Appeal affirmed in 1961. People v. ”