Habeas Corpus relief is granted by a federal court to those who can prove that their imprisonment violates their constitutional rights. The groundwork for a successful habeas corpus petition starts long before the petition is filed.
Supposedly a prisoner can petition for habeas corpus relief without a lawyer. The filing fee is almost nothing. The courts prefer that prisoners use the form that the court provides free of charge.
The federal habeas corpus court will not decide whether the prisoner’s constitutional rights were violated unless the prisoner has given the state courts the chance to make that decision first, by exhausting his state-court remedies. To do this, the prisoner must raise his constitutional claim through “one complete round of the state's established appellate review process.” In Illinois, that means the claim must be raised in the circuit court, raised again on direct appeal, and raised a third time in a petition for leave to appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. In Missouri, prisoners do not need to ask for supreme-court review to exhaust their state remedies.
So in Illinois the petition for leave to appeal to the state supreme court is all-important. If you didn’t petition for leave to appeal, either on direct appeal or on post-conviction appeal, your habeas corpus petition will be dismissed. If you want to know what issues you can raise in habeas corpus court, first look at your petitions for leave to appeal to the state supreme court. You may not be able to raise all of the issues in those petitions, but the ones that are not there are gone.
