Two April 18 Supreme Court decisions provide both a ray of hope for condemned prisoners — the few who may be innocent as well as the many who are murderers — and a window into the byzantine maze of technicalities that death row law has become.

So byzantine is the law that sometimes even well-respected newspapers cannot agree on which way the Court is headed. In front-page stories the day after the rulings, The Washington Post explained that the Court had "curtailed the power of federal judges to override state court decisions against death row prisoners." The New York Times, on the other hand, said the Court had determined that "federal judges still have a significant role to play in reviewing the quality of justice administered by the states."

There is truth in both perspectives. But most death penalty critics and defense lawyers were, on balance, pleased. The Court made it clear that lower federal courts still can, and sometimes should, overturn state convictions and sentences. The Justices also set an example for lower court judges by finding — for the first time in the Court’s history — that a court-appointed defense lawyer had performed so badly as to violate the defendant’s long-recognized, but rarely enforced, Constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel.

The immediate effect of the rulings was to give reprieves to two murderers on Virginia’s death row, the first (Terry Williams) because his court-appointed lawyers had botched his sentencing hearing, and the second (Michael Williams) because one of his court-appointed lawyers had not botched his appeal. (The cases, and Terry and Michael Williams, are unrelated.)

Inconsistent? Not if you examine the two cases through the peculiar prism of death penalty law, which befuddles both state prisoners who want federal tickets off of death row and state officials who want to get on with the executions.