Opinion ID: 2812240
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the effect of williams

Text: Although they suffer from their own unique deficiencies, see infra § III.B, Head’s twin tolling arguments are doomed by a common flaw—nothing in our pre–Williams jurisprudence prevented Head from pursuing his IAAC claim in a timely federal habeas petition. To the contrary, we emphasized in Williams that, since the 1980s, our case law “seemed to have assumed that the district court would have jurisdiction to entertain” IAAC claims, notwithstanding section 23-110’s otherwise broad prohibition of federal jurisdiction. 586 F.3d at 998–99 (discussing Streater II, 691 F.2d at 1028); see also Whiteside v. United States, 775 F.3d 180, 186 (4th Cir. 2014) (en banc) (no tolling if earlier 8 The Government concedes that, if AEDPA’s statute of limitations was tolled until our Williams decision became final, the pendency of Head’s section 23-110 motion further tolled AEDPA’s statute of limitations and, therefore, his habeas petition would be timely. 12 precedent “strongly foreshadowed” intervening change in law). In other words, Williams simply made explicit what had already been implicit: when the D.C. Court of Appeals barred prisoners from raising IAAC claims under section 23-110 in the early 1980s, the plain terms of section 23-110(g) opened the door to federal habeas review for those claims. See Williams, 586 F.3d at 998. Indeed, no case prevented the petitioner in Williams from timely raising his IAAC claim in his federal habeas petition and, when he raised it, we agreed that the district court had jurisdiction to hear it. See id. at 1000; see also Whiteside, 775 F.3d at 186. Head raises two counter-arguments, neither of which we find persuasive. First, he points to our isolated statement in Williams that “we have already recognized some exceptions under section 23-110(g), and today we recognize another.” Williams, 586 F.3d at 1000 (emphasis added). But it does not follow that our express “recogni[tion]” in Williams that IAAC claims are cognizable in federal court means that they were categorically foreclosed before. Id. In fact, Williams, read in toto, makes plain that we did no more than make explicit our earlier “assum[ption]” that a prisoner sentenced in superior court can raise an IAAC claim in federal court, notwithstanding section 23-110’s broad language barring federal jurisdiction. Id. at 999 (citing Streater II, 691 F.2d at 1028). Second, Head cites Collier v. United States, No. 99-5120, 1999 WL 1336229 (D.C. Cir. Dec. 15, 1999) (per curiam), as evidencing that IAAC claims were barred before Williams. In Collier, an unpublished order, we denied a pro se petitioner’s request for a COA after the district court dismissed his habeas petition, which petition contained an IAAC claim. Id. at . We first observed that the petitioner had “properly pursued a motion to recall mandate, which is an appropriate collateral 13 procedure for presenting an ineffective assistance of appellate counsel claim.” Id. We then reasoned that the petitioner had not “demonstrated that his local remedy was inadequate or ineffective” because “[f]ailure to prevail in that court does not render his local remedies inadequate or ineffective.” Id. Therefore, we concluded that he had failed to make the requisite “showing of a denial of a substantial constitutional right” for the issuance of a COA. Id. Head’s reliance on Collier suffers from a trio of defects. As a threshold matter, Collier is an unpublished order entered before January 1, 2002. Accordingly, our rules mandate that Collier is “not to be cited as precedent,” see D.C. CIR. R. 32.1(b)(1)(A), 9 and we do not rely on it as such, see D.C. CIR. R. 36(e)(2) (“[A] panel’s decision to issue an unpublished disposition means that the panel sees no precedential value in that disposition.”); see also Nat’l Classification Comm. v. United States, 765 F.2d 164, 170 (D.C. Cir. 1985) (“[U]npublished opinion . . . has no precedential effect with respect to other parties.”). Next, it appears that the petitioner in Collier argued that the “local remedy” provided by the D.C. Court of Appeals “was inadequate or ineffective” because he “fail[ed] to prevail” on his motion to recall the mandate. Collier, 1999 WL 1336229, at . Nothing in Collier suggests that the petitioner argued that he had no adequate local remedy because section 23-110 review was unavailable and nothing in Collier suggests that, had he made 9 Our rules distinguish between unpublished dispositions entered before January 1, 2002, which “are not to be cited as precedent,” D.C. CIR. R. 32.1(b)(1)(A), and those entered on or after January 1, 2002, which “may be cited as precedent,” D.C. CIR. R. 32.1(b)(1)(B), even though the issuing “panel’s decision to issue an unpublished disposition means that the panel sees no precedential value in that disposition,” D.C. CIR. R. 36(e)(2). 14 that claim—which we not only addressed and endorsed in Williams but also anticipated in Streater II—we would have held that federal habeas jurisdiction was lacking. Finally, and most importantly, we decided Collier on December 15, 1999, more than two years after AEDPA’s statute of limitations expired on April 24, 1997. “Needless to say,” Head “could not have let the deadline pass in reliance upon an order that the court had not yet entered.” Baxter, 761 F.3d at 31. This sweeping defect controls our disposition of Head’s statutory and equitable tolling arguments. Nevertheless, there are additional problems with both arguments, which problems we briefly discuss.