There might be something in the water at the New York State Court of Appeals*, because it is rare to see a comfortable majority win this sorely.

At 19, Omar Alvarez’s gang shot at a group of younger teenagers, killing one and disabling the other. After a three-month trial and his conviction, Alvarez refused to apologize and laughed at his sentencing. The judge, knowing deep in the cockles of his heart that Alvarez could never be rehabilitated, sentenced him to a minimum of 66.6 years in prison before parole was even available. More on that later.

Alvarez asked New York for a free lawyer for his appeal. But the 18B Panel didn’t send him its best, and it was three years after the appointment before Alvarez got a letter:

Enclosed please find a copy of your transcript which has been separated from the transcript of your co-defendants’. I am presently preparing your appeal brief and it will be submitted as soon as it has been completed.

The letter was missing an important detail: Alvarez’s lawyer had waited so long to file anything that the appellate court had threatened to dismiss the appeal if he didn’t get something done. Crunched for time (as well as ability) the lawyer submitted a 20-page brief raising four issues. The prosecution (who took more care choosing its own lawyers than those it gave to the indigent) responded with a 175-page monstrosity. Alvarez’s appeal was denied.

Decades later, Alvarez filed a petition asking for his case to be reheard under unusual New York law: Under some circumstances, courts there will find an appellate lawyer ineffective not simply because a better lawyer might have won, but because his performance was substandard enough to deny the defendant “fair process.”

What were some of the problems with the brief? Well, for one thing, it didn’t cite any cases. For another, it didn’t cite to the record. For a third, it raised issues no competent lawyer would raise, for instance that the government isn’t entitled to search the immediate vicinity of an arrestee upon arrest. And for a fourth, it’s written like this:

The defendant was placed at a handicap because he was not aware who was going to testify against him for the records were sealed and the witnesses were not known until they testified. This interfered with the ability to cross exam a witness that you were not aware of until he took the stand.

Finally, despite the fact that this was a 19-year-old sentenced to what was effectively life without parole, the attorney didn’t ask the appellate court to reduce the sentence as too harsh, the one option that might have led to some relief.

But the majority was untroubled by these problems.

In the instant matter, there is no question that the brief filed by appellate counsel was somewhat terse, could have been better drafted, and is not a model to be emulated. Nevertheless, the brief demonstrated appellate counsel’s grasp of the relevant facts and law.

Sure, the brief was written like crap, but “even if the same preserved issues raised in the appellate brief filed on his behalf had been championed more effectively, they would have fared no better.” The bad writing is solved by the bad issue selection.

That our colleagues quibble over such minuscule issues, largely exalting form over substance, is telling.

And what about Alvarez’s claim that his lawyer only wrote to him once in three years? Codswollop, the Court says, since he had only his own unsupported (but sworn) statement that he hadn’t. The dissent points out that the letter doesn’t reference any previous communications and that the letter appeared to be prompted solely by appellate counsel’s fear of imminent dismissal of the case.

But the majority, with a regal wave of its gavel, states that “such unsupported speculation demonstrates that the defendant failed to satisfy his burden of proof.” Thus the direct evidence that the lawyer never spoke to the client is undercut by the circumstantial evidence that the lawyer never spoke to the client.

Finally, Judge Rowan Wilson took the time to learn the facts of this case, and pens a separate dissent. He points out that, once in prison, Alvarez actually improved. He took every class available to him. He got his GED. He married a woman and started a family, and did his best to be a father. And while some parts of his life got better, others got worse. His prison failed to diagnose his non-Hodgkin Lymphoma until it had compressed his spine and rendered him paraplegic.

If Alvarez had asked for a lesser, more proportional sentence as he was entitled to do, Judge Wilson argued, there was a good chance the court might have given it to him. That we wouldn’t have to throw him away before we knew what kind of person he would become was an option he was denied.

And even with all this improvement, as Wilson points out, Alvarez wasn’t asking for parole. He was simply asking for the opportunity for a lawyer who would argue for a reduced sentence, based in part on the man he’d become over 25 years.

It’s a compelling emotional argument. One that, according to the majority, “distills to little more than an old proverb: “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” It would be a travesty, the majority says, to “second-guess” the “reasonable professional judgments” of a lawyer who raised issues so crappy no amount of excellent lawyering could make them viable.

This is not a shocking result. Petitioners lose cases all the time. But what’s truly distinctive is the way Judge Leslie Stein, who wrote the opinion, calls out the dissenters by name and, rather than addressing their arguments directly, sort of waves at the weakest parts of them in isolation while tossing out a passel of adjectives. Maybe it’s too much to hope that a court will show a little grace to the condemned. But to withhold it from its own members is a bridge too far.

*In New York, the state’s highest court is the Court of Appeals, while its trial court is called the Supreme Court.