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A few days after Christmas, a divided three-judge panel of the court ruled that Ronald B. Smith, a death row inmate in Alabama, could not pursue a challenge to his conviction and sentence because he had not "properly filed" a document by a certain deadline.

As it happens, there is no dispute that the document was filed on time. But it was not "properly filed," the majority said, because Mr. Smith's lawyer did not at the same time pay the $154 filing fee or file a motion to establish something also not in dispute — that his client was indigent.

Nor did the majority place much weight on the fact that the lawyer himself was on probation for public intoxication and addicted to crystal methamphetamine while he was being less than punctilious. In the months that followed, the lawyer would be charged with drug possession, declare bankruptcy and commit suicide.

Mr. Smith is almost surely guilty of murdering a convenience store clerk in 1994 in Huntsville, Ala. But it is not clear that he deserves to die for his crime.

His jury, by a vote of seven to five, determined that the murder did not warrant the death penalty, recommending instead that Mr. Smith be sentenced to life in prison.

But the Alabama capital justice system has many idiosyncrasies. One of them is that it allows judges to override such recommendations. The judge rejected the jury's recommendation and sentenced Mr. Smith to death.

Only two other states, Delaware and Florida, allow such overrides. But it has been decades since anyone was sentenced to death in either state after a jury recommended life.

Since 1976, Alabama judges have rejected sentencing recommendations from capital juries 110 times, according to data compiled by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm that represents poor people and prisoners. In 100 of those cases, judges imposed the death penalty after juries had called for a life sentence. The most recent override in the direction of death was in September.

The Supreme Court considered the quality of Alabama's capital justice system in a blown-deadline case last year and did not seem impressed.

"Nearly alone among the states, Alabama does not guarantee representation to indigent capital defendants in post-conviction proceedings," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for a seven-justice majority in Maples v. Thomas. "On occasion, some prisoners sentenced to death receive no post-conviction representation at all."

That case involved Cory R. Maples, an Alabama death row inmate who missed a filing deadline because of a mix-up in the mailroom of a prominent New York law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell.

Mr. Maples's lawyers had done more than neglect to attach a check to their legal papers; they missed the deadline completely.

They were, moreover, working at one of the most prestigious firms in the nation. "I have little doubt that the vast majority of criminal defendants would think that they had won the lottery if they were given the opportunity to be represented by attorneys from such a firm," Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote of Sullivan & Cromwell, in a concurrence.

Now consider Mr. Smith's lawyer, C. Wade Johnson, who was battling a crippling drug addiction throughout his representation of Mr. Smith. According to a sworn statement from his legal assistant, he would often turn up at the office intoxicated and sometimes had to be roused at home and taken to court appearances.

By the time of the deadline at issue, in 2001, Mr. Johnson had twice been arrested, for public intoxication and drug possession. Less than a month after the deadline, Mr. Johnson was rushed to the hospital while visiting a client in prison, leaving his dog locked in his car.

In the process of freeing the dog, officials found a bag of crystal meth, which led to more drug charges. Mr. Johnson's fortunes spiraled further from there, and he took his own life in 2002.

The majority in Mr. Smith's case wrote that all of this might suffice to excuse the incomplete filing were it not for a second lawyer's involvement in the case. But that lawyer was based in Tennessee and was not authorized to practice law in Alabama.

Judge Rosemary Barkett dissented, saying she did not see how the case was materially different from that of Mr. Maples or a 2010 rebuke from the Supreme Court to her court. In that second case, a Florida death row inmate named Albert Holland was given a new opportunity to argue that his lawyer's inaccessibility and incompetence had caused him to miss a deadline. In a concurrence in April in yet another blown-deadline case, Judge Barkett identified the larger question that runs through these cases: why is it morally permissible to blame clients for their lawyers' mistakes?

The legal system generally answers by saying that lawyers are their clients' agents. The answer makes perfect sense when you are talking about sophisticated clients who choose their lawyers, supervise their work and fire them if they turn out to be incompetent or worse.

But the theory turns problematic, Judge Barkett wrote, when the clients are on death row, have no role in the selection of their lawyers and have no real control over them.

Allowing Mr. Smith's challenge to be heard in a federal court does not mean he would prevail. But, Judge Barkett said, he ought to be allowed to make his case. "It is unjust and inequitable," she wrote, "to require death row inmates to suffer the consequences of their attorneys' negligence."