We have both served for many years on the federal bench, as trial and appellate judges, and one of us as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We feel compelled to sound the alarm about a proposed radical assault on the great writ of habeas corpus that Congress may take up this week before it adjourns for the election campaign.

Timothy K. Lewis, a former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, is a partner at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP in Washington, D.C. William S. Sessions, a former director of the FBI and chief judge of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, is a partner at Holland and Knight law firm in Washington, D.C.

This assault would dramatically limit the ability of federal courts to protect individuals who may have been wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison or even death. We applaud Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., for recently condemning a pending proposal to deny habeas rights to those held as "enemy combatants." We urge him to do the same for those convicted of crimes in the United States.

We take a back seat to no one in our support for strong law enforcement, but we are equally committed to our country's long-standing commitment to fair trials and constitutional safeguards. These safeguards are essential to making as sure as possible that when we charge someone with a crime, we have the right person and that that person, if convicted, receives the sentence he or she deserves.

All Americans should be alarmed at the many recent exonerations of innocent people who have served years in prison or on death row. Not only have we locked up the wrong people, but the true perpetrators remain free to inflict more harm.

As a result, we are profoundly disturbed about reports of a new and misguided assault on the writ of habeas corpus. In a back-door action, the provision in question would be attached to entirely unrelated legislation in the few remaining days before Congress adjourns. It has never been examined by any congressional committee, so no senator or representative has heard what no doubt would be an outcry of public opposition against it.

The provision would cover much of the same ground as the Streamlined Procedures Act, an ill-conceived bill that generated enormous opposition last year. For the first time, both the Judicial Conference, representing the country's federal judges, and the Conference of Chief Justices, representing the chief justices of all states, forcefully opposed the act because it would have stripped the federal courts of much of their jurisdiction to hear habeas petitions.

Numerous other reasonable voices across the political spectrum also opposed this legislation. They did so because, as the chief justices stated, "The wrongful conviction of an innocent person leaves the actual perpetrator free and undermines public trust and confidence in our criminal justice system."

The current measure would add at least two new and pernicious provisions.

First, it would give the prosecution an important advantage by accelerating review of federal habeas petitions and by making it virtually impossible to raise new claims discovered after an extremely short six-month statute of limitations has expired.

This "fast-track" treatment is taken from the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which entitles states to procedural advantages in capital cases only if they have provided competent lawyers and reasonable funding for important post-conviction reviews. Congress and the courts have repeatedly found that inexperienced, underfunded and incompetent lawyers have contributed dramatically to the mistakes and injustices that have caused many erroneous convictions. Just a few months ago, Congress amended AEDPA, but it left intact the requirement that states establish satisfactory post-conviction systems for death row inmates or else be denied these procedural benefits.

The current proposal simply ignores this requirement and, in certain cases in which a public safety officer or judge is killed, provides states with these procedural advantages without requiring they ensure that potentially meritorious claims of constitutional error were adequately developed and considered by state courts.

Second, the proposal strips the federal courts of their jurisdiction to hear sentencing claims in these kinds of cases. If this proposal had been law in the past, federal courts would not have been able to correct egregious constitutional errors.

During the past several years, the Supreme Court has correctly reversed a number of death sentences because of egregious sentencing error, either because of hapless representation by defense counsel, as in Williams v. Taylor, Wiggins v. Smith and Rompilla v. Beard, or because prosecutors broke the law and suppressed the fact that a key sentencing witness was a paid informant and committed perjury before the jury, as in Banks v. Dretke. Do we want someone executed where it turns out his death sentence was based on inaccurate, perjured testimony?

The current proposal would prevent the courts from granting relief in such cases in the future and substantially inhibit a certain class of individuals from seeking to vindicate their constitutional rights. It also portends future bills granting states similar procedural advantages in cases involving other classes of individuals, such as those convicted of killing children, other government officials, etc.

In the end, we fear, the great writ that protects us all will be nothing more than swiss cheese, with more holes than cheese.