Source: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/545/644.html
Timestamp: 2017-02-25 21:15:18
Document Index: 170887130

Matched Legal Cases: ['§2244', '§2254', '§28', '§2244', '§15', '§1979', '§1983', '§1983', '§2244']

MAYLE v. FELIX [04-563] | FindLaw
MAYLE v. FELIX [04-563]
MAYLE, WARDEN v. FELIX, (2005)
Argued: April 19, 2005 Decided: June 23, 2005
Felix's conviction was affirmed on appeal and became final on August 12, 1997. Under the one-year limitation period imposed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), 28 U. S. C. §2244(d)(1), Felix had until August 12, 1998 to file a habeas petition in federal court. On May 8, 1998, in a timely filed habeas petition, Felix asserted his Confrontation Clause challenge to admission of the videotaped prosecution witness testimony, but did not then challenge the admission of his own pretrial statements. On January 28, 1999, over five months after the August 12, 1998 expiration of AEDPA's time limit and eight months after the court appointed counsel to represent him, Felix filed an amended petition asserting a Fifth Amendment objection to admission of his pretrial statements. In response to the State's argument that the Fifth Amendment claim was time barred, Felix asserted the rule that pleading amendments relate back to the filing date of the original pleading when both the original plea and the amendment arise out of the same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth ... in the original pleading," Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 15(c)(2). Because his Fifth Amendment and Confrontation Clause claims challenged the constitutionality of the same criminal conviction, Felix urged, both claims arose out of the same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence." The District Court dismissed the Fifth Amendment claim as time barred, and rejected the Confrontation Clause claim on its merits. The Ninth Circuit affirmed as to the latter claim, but reversed the dismissal of the coerced statements claim and remanded it for further proceedings. In the court's view, the relevant "transaction" for Rule 15(c)(2) purposes was Felix's state-court trial and conviction. Defining transaction with greater specificity, the court reasoned, would unduly strain the meaning of "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" by dividing the trial and conviction into a series of individual occurrences. Held: An amended habeas petition does not relate back (and thereby avoid AEDPA's one-year time limit) when it asserts a new ground for relief supported by facts that differ in both time and type from those set forth in the original pleading. Pp. 7-18.
Ginsburg, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Souter, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, J., joined.
In 1995, after a jury trial in Sacramento, California, respondent Jacoby Lee Felix was found guilty of murder and robbery stemming from his participation in a carjacking in which the driver of the car was shot and killed. App. E to Pet. for Cert. 2-7. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. App. C to Pet. for Cert. 1-2. The current controversy centers on two alleged errors at Felix's trial. Both involve the admission of out-of-court statements during the prosecutor's case in chief, but the two are otherwise unrelated. One prompted a Fifth Amendment self-incrimination objection originally raised in the trial court, the other, a Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause challenge, also raised in the trial proceedings. Felix's Fifth Amendment claim rested on the prosecution's introduction of statements Felix made during pretrial police interrogation. These statements were adduced at trial on direct examination of the investigating officer. Felix urged that the police used coercive tactics to elicit the statements. Id., at 8-9. His Sixth Amendment claim related to the admission of the videotaped statements prosecution witness Kenneth Williams made at a jailhouse interview. The videotape records Williams, a friend of Felix, telling the police that he had overheard a conversation in which Felix described the planned robbery just before it occurred. When Williams testified at trial that he did not recall the police interview, the trial court determined that Williams' loss of memory was feigned, and that the videotape was admissible because it contained prior inconsistent statements. App. E to Pet. for Cert. 10-13.
"CAUTION: You must include in this petition all the grounds for relief from the conviction or sentence that you challenge. And you must state the facts that support each ground. If you fail to set forth all the grounds in this petition, you may be barred from presenting additional grounds at a later date." Petition for Relief From a Conviction or Sentence By a Person in State Custody, Habeas Corpus Rules, Forms App. (emphasis inoriginal).
Felix artificially truncates his claims by homing in only on what makes them actionable in a habeas proceeding. We do not here question his assertion that his Fifth Amendment right did not ripen until his statements were admitted against him at trial. See Chavez, 373 U. S. 503, 513-514 (1963) (voluntariness is evaluated by examining the "totality of circumstances" surrounding the "making and signing of the challenged confession").
The Court of Appeals got it right, and I respectfully dissent. FOOTNOTESFootnote 1 The Habeas Corpus Rules were recently amended, effective December 1, 2004. Because the amended Rules are not materially different from those in effect when Felix filed his habeas petition, this opinion refers to the current version of the Rules.
Footnote 2 Because Felix had not presented his coerced statements Fifth Amendment claim on appeal to the California courts, the State moved to dismiss the amended petition on the ground that it contained both exhausted and unexhausted claims. See 28 U. S. C. §2254(b)(1)(A); Brief for Respondent 6-7. Before the Magistrate Judge acted on the motion, Felix presented the coerced statements/ineffective assistance claim to the California Supreme Court in a habeas petition. Opposition to Respondents' Motion to Dismiss in No. Civ. S-98-0828 WBS GGH P (ED Cal.), p. 3. After that court denied the petition without comment, the State withdrew its motion to dismiss. See Request to Vacate Hearing on Motion to Dismiss in No. Civ. S-98-0828 WBS GGH P (ED Cal.), pp. 1-2.
Footnote 3 Section 2255 establishes a separate avenue for postconviction challenges to federal, as opposed to state, convictions. Footnote 4 Habeas corpus proceedings are characterized as civil in nature. See, e.g., Fisher v. Baker, 203 U. S. 174, 181 (1906).
Footnote 5 The dissent asserts that Clipper Exxpress is comparable to this case in according Rule 15(c)(2) a " 'capacious' " reading. Post, at 4, n. 2. Clipper Exxpress involved a series of allegedly sham protests, commonly designed to restrain trade, a charge of the pattern or practice type. The amendment in question added a fraud charge, a new legal theory tied to the same operative facts as those initially alleged. Clipper Exxpress, 690 F. 2d, at 1259, n. 29. That unremarkable application of the relation-back rule bears little resemblance to the argument made by Felix and embraced by the dissent--that all manner of factually and temporally unrelated conduct may be raised after the statute of limitations has run and relate back, so long as the new and originally pleaded claims challenge the same conviction. See infra, at 12-15.
Footnote 6 The dissent builds a complex discussion on an apparent assumption that claim preclusion operates in habeas cases largely as it does in mine-run civil cases. See post, at 9-11. Ironically, few habeas petitions would survive swift dismissal were that so, for the very objective of the petition is to undo a final judgment after direct appeals have been exhausted or are time barred. On judicial and legislative development of standards governing successive habeas petitions, standards that do not track the Restatement of Judgments, see Schlup v. Delo, 513 U. S. 298, 317-320 (1995); 2 R. Hertz & J. Liebman, Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure §28.2b, pp. 1270-1275 (4th ed. 2001); Note, Developments in the Law--Federal Habeas Corpus, 83 Harv. L. Rev. 1038, 1113, 1148-1154 (1970). The dissent would read Rule 15(c)(2)'s words, "conduct, transaction, or occurrence," into AEDPA's provisions governing second or successive petitions and motions (28 U. S. C. §§2244(b) and 2255, ¶8), although Congress did not put those words there. Nor is there any other reason to believe that Congress designed AEDPA's confinement of successive petitions and motions with a view to the relation back concept employed in Rule 15(c)(2).
Footnote 7 For example, in Mandacina v. United States, 328 F. 3d 995, 1000-1001 (CA8 2003), the original petition alleged violations of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 (1963), while the amended petition alleged the Government's failure to disclose a particular report. Both pleadings related to evidence obtained at the same time by the same police department. The Court of Appeals approved relation back. And in Woodward v. Williams, 263 F. 3d 1135, 1142 (CA10 2001), the appeals court upheld relation back where the original petition challenged the trial court's admission of recanted statements, while the amended petition challenged the court's refusal to allow the defendant to show that the statements had been recanted. See also 3 J. Moore, et al., Moore's Federal Practice §15.19[2], p. 15-82 (3d ed. 2004) (relation back ordinarily allowed "when the new claim is based on the same facts as the original pleading and only changes the legal theory"). Footnote 8 The dissent is concerned that our decision "creates an unfair disparity between indigent habeas petitioners and those able to afford their own counsel." Post, at 1; see post, at 11 ("[T]oday's decision ... will fall most heavily on the shoulders of indigent habeas petitioners who can afford no counsel without the assistance of the court."). The concern is understandable, although we note that in Felix's case, counsel was appointed, and had some two and a half months to amend the petition before AEDPA's limitation period expired. See supra, at 4. That was ample time to add a claim based on the alleged pretrial extraction of damaging statements from Felix. Ordinarily, as we observed in Halbert v. Michigan, ante, at 17, n. 8, the government (federal or state) " 'need not equalize economic conditions' between criminal defendants of lesser and greater wealth." (quoting Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S. 12, 23 (1956) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in judgment); see Pennsylvania v. Finley, 481 U. S. 551, 557 (1987) (holding that States need not provide appointed counsel in postconviction proceedings). This case, it is inescapably true, does not fit within the confined circumstances in which our decisions require appointment of counsel for an indigent litigant at a critical stage to ensure his meaningful access to justice. See Halbert, ante, at 2-4, 17, n. 8. FOOTNOTESFootnote 1 There is a tendency toward the gestalt in reading the phrase, but the three items are distinct, and a party claiming the benefit of the rule need satisfy only one.
Footnote 2 In any event, it is not clear why it is more "capacious," ante, at 11, to regard a single trial lasting days or weeks as one transaction or occurrence than it is, for example, to view numerous separate protests filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission over a period of two years (each in response to a different proposed tariff amendment) as one transaction or occurrence, see Clipper Exxpress v. Rocky Mountain Motor Tariff Bureau, Inc., 690 F. 2d 1240, 1260, n. 29 (CA9 1982) ("The protests involve a single transaction or occurrence" (emphasis deleted)), cited ante, at 11.
Footnote 3 Neither does the warning on the model habeas petition (that failure to set forth every ground for relief may preclude the presentation of additional grounds later) tell us anything about relation back. The Court implies that it does, ante, at 9, but the language on the form says nothing about relation back, and if the Court's implication were correct then the warning would also bar amendments filed within the limitations period.
Footnote 4 By contrast, use at trial of the fruits of the alleged police misconduct would not be a prerequisite to success in an action under Rev. Stat. §1979, 42 U. S. C. §1983, because such an action would indeed be challenging the conduct itself rather than the custody obtained by use at trial of the fruits of that conduct. Cf. ante, at 12 (citing Jackson v. Suffolk County Homicide Bureau, 135 F. 3d 254 (CA2 1998), where the Court of Appeals, in a §1983 case, concluded that two different instances of postarrest police conduct were not part of a single transaction or occurrence). The Court's analysis thus lies in some tension with our understanding that the signal, defining feature setting habeas cases apart from other tort claims against the State is that they "necessarily demonstrat[e] the invalidity of the conviction," Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U. S. 477, 481-482 (1994); see generally Wilkinson v. Dotson, 544 U. S. ___, ___ (2005) (slip op., at 3-7).
Footnote 5 There are other examples of the Court's describing Felix's claims with reference to the trial. See ante, at 3 ("Felix's Fifth Amendment claim rested on the prosecution's introduction of statements Felix made during pretrial police interrogation... . His Sixth Amendment claim related to the admission of the videotaped statements prosecution witness Kenneth Williams made at a jailhouse interview"); ante, at 4 ("On direct appeal, Felix urged ... that the admission of Williams' videotaped statements violated Felix's constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. He did not, however, argue that admission of his own pretrial statements violated his right to protection against self-incrimination"). Footnote 6 See Neder v. United States, 527 U. S. 1, 18 (1999) ("The erroneous admission of evidence in violation of the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination, and the erroneous exclusion of evidence in violation of the right to confront witnesses guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment are both subject to harmless-error analysis under our cases" (citations omitted)); Penry v. Johnson, 532 U. S. 782, 795 (2001) (success on Fifth Amendment self-incrimination claim in habeas case requires showing that the error had "substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jury's verdict" (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also, e.g., Banks v. Dretke, 540 U. S. 668, 691 (2004) (elements of prosecutorial misconduct claim under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 (1963), include showing of prejudice); Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U. S. 637, 643 (1974) (improper prosecutorial comment not reversible error unless remarks "so infec[t] the trial with unfairness as to make the resulting conviction a denial of due process"); Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668, 695 (1984) (to find prejudice for purposes of ineffective assistance claim, court "must consider the totality of the evidence before the judge or jury").
Footnote 7 The Court asserts that my argument here "builds ... on an apparent assumption that claim preclusion operates in habeas cases largely as it does in mine-run civil cases." Ante, at 15, n. 6. In actuality, the argument rests only on a fact we have previously recognized: that AEDPA's "restrictions on successive petitions constitute a modified res judicata rule ... ." Felker v. Turpin, 518 U. S. 651, 664 (1996).
Footnote 8 The Court is mistaken in stating that I "would read Rule 15(c)(2)'s words, 'conduct, transaction, or occurrence,' into ... 28 U. S. C. §§2244(b) and 2255, ¶8 ... ." Ante, at 15, n. 6. What I would do is adopt, for purposes of reconciling Rule 15(c)(2) with AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations, a definition of "transaction" that is consistent with what other sections of AEDPA, those governing second or successive petitions, functionally regard as the relevant "transaction."
Footnote 9 It is not that I see the Court's rule as constitutionally troubling. But this case requires us to apply text that is ambiguous, and the Court's resolution of that ambiguity is based on the assumption that when Congress authorized the appointment of counsel in habeas cases, it would have intended the appointed lawyer to have one hand tied behind his back, as compared with an attorney hired by a prisoner with money. That is not in my view a sound assumption. (The Court also observes that in this case counsel had plenty of time to file an amended petition, but that fact cannot drive this decision, for the rule the Court adopts today will of course apply in cases other than this one.)
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