Opinion ID: 3011847
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: ) At this time, my Waiver for 212-c is pending and

Text: I made this fact known to the Immigration Judge . . . . The language describing who may be eligible for 212-c Waiver states that a permanent resident (or green card holder) who has been in the U.S. for at least seven years at the time of filing must be considered. 8 C.F.R. Section 212(f)(2) . . .. When the description given is held in comparison to the circumstances of my case then, there can be no question that I am a suitable candidate for some form of 212 Waiver. I must reiterate that I already have an application for 212-c pending with the I.N.S. and this information alone should have resulted in the Immigration Judge staying and or postponing any further action on my case until such time that as a final disposition regarding my 212-c Waiver is handed down. The United States Constitution promises under the Fourteenth (14) Amendment which in fact guarantees equal protection to aliens and citizens 4 alike . . . . Not only has the spirit of the 14th Amendment been broken but, in the partial manner in which the Judge decided this, the actual letter of the law is being blatantly broken as well. . . . Furthermore, I file[d] an order to show cause and the accompanying 212-c Waiver on the INS and the Attorney General’s Office dated 1991, and[there] has been no disposition as of yet . . . . Both the show cause and the 212-c Waiver were file[d] years before any of the recent changes in the INA Law went into effect. According to Zayas, he mailed his notice of appeal from prison on February 16, 1997, two days before the February 18 filing deadline; however, Zayas’s appeal was not received by the BIA until February 24. The BIA dismissed the appeal as untimely on April 16, 1997.3 Subsequent to the BIA’s dismissal of his appeal, Zayas filed a series of habeas corpus petitions. Acting pro se, Zayas filed two habeas petitions in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. _________________________________________________________________ 3. Since the appropriateness of the BIA’s dismissal of Zayas’s appeal as untimely is not at issue here, we will simply note that the BIA’s administration of its timeliness rules seems, in spirit, not entirely in harmony with the Supreme Court’s opinion in Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266 (1988), in which the Court ruled that a pro se prisoner’s appeal to the court of appeals of a district court order dismissing his habeas corpus petition was timely filed, in conformity with Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1), when handed to the prison authorities in the facility in which he was in custody within the time specified by Rule 4(a)(1): The situation of prisoners seeking to appeal without the aid of counsel is unique. Such prisoners cannot take the steps other litigants can take to monitor the processing of their notices of appeal and to ensure that the court clerk receives and stamps their notices of appeal before the 30-day deadline. . . . [T]he pro se prisoner has no choice but to entrust the forwarding of his notice of appeal to prison authorities whom he cannot control or supervise and who may have every incentive to delay. . . . Unskilled in law, unaided by counsel, and unable to leave the prison, his control over the processing of his notice necessarily ceases as soon as he hands it over to the only public officials to whom he has access -- the prison authorities. . . . 487 U.S. at 270-271; see also Burns v. Morton, 134 F.3d 109, 112-13 (3rd Cir. 1998). 5 In the first petition, filed on June 15, 1998, Zayas argued that his indefinite detention pending deportation was unlawful. In a Report and Recommendation, Magistrate Judge Rapoport found Zayas to be in error regarding the applicable law, and recommended that the petition be DENIED AND DISMISSED. Judge Reed approved and adopted the Report and Recommendation on October 6, 1998. Zayas’s second habeas petition was filed on June 30, 1999. Magistrate Judge Rapoport filed a Report and Recommendation in which he found that Zayas had raised essentially the same issues as he had in the first petition, and that Zayas’s petition should therefore be dismissed. Again Judge Reed adopted the Report and Recommendation and dismissed the second habeas petition on August 11, 1999. Meanwhile, on July 26, 1999, Zayas had filed with this court a petition styled Motion for Review. In this submission, Zayas asked this court to review a decision by the INS District Director denying Zayas’s release from detention.4 The INS subsequently moved to dismiss the Motion for Review. On March 3, 2000, this court denied the motion to dismiss and ordered that the Motion for Review and an accompanying motion for appointment of counsel be transferred to the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (the district in which Zayas was in custody), instructing that the matter be treated as a petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. S 2241. The grievance that Zayas had pressed in his first two habeas petitions -- to wit, his claim that his indefinite detention was unlawful -- was resolved on June 30, 2000, when he was released from INS custody on bond pending his removal to Cuba. Upon his release, Zayas moved to dismiss the habeas petition that had its genesis as a Motion for Review, and which was by that time pending in _________________________________________________________________ 4. As the government points out in its brief on this appeal, the District Court was under the impression that the Motion for Review constituted an appeal by Zayas to this court from the dismissal of his second habeas petition. Rather, the Motion for Review initiated a separate proceeding. Brief for Appellee at 6 n.3. 6 the Middle District. The District Court granted Zayas’s motion and dismissed the petition on July 12, 2000. On July 27, 1999 -- one day after filing in this court the Motion for Review challenging his continued detention, but several months before the Motion for Review was transferred by this court to the Middle District-- Zayas filed in the Middle District a new habeas petition under S 2241. In this petition, Zayas did not raise the indefinite detention issue which he had sought to present in the two Eastern District habeas petitions and which, in a later context, was the subject of the Motion for Review. Instead, he sought judiciary review, based on a determination that he is eligible for relief from deportation under section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act -- a reprise of the issue Zayas had attempted to present in the appeal dismissed by the BIA as untimely. In his Report and Recommendation, Magistrate Judge Durkin concluded that the new S 2241 petition should be dismissed on two alternative grounds. First, he found Zayas’s petition to be a second or successive petition which can only be filed in a district court if the court of appeals has granted permission for such filing. In his Report and Recommendation, Magistrate Judge Durkin summarized the process as follows: [P]ursuant to 28 U.S.C. S 2244(b)(3)(A), prior to filing a second or successive petition, a petitioner must move in the appropriate court of appeals for an order authorizing the district court to consider the application. Pursuant to S 2244(b)(2), in order for the court of appeals to grant such an application, it must find that the claim presented in the second or successive petition relies on a new rule of constitutional law, made retroactive to cases on collateral review by the Supreme Court, that was previously unavailable, or that the factual predicate for the claim could not have been discovered previously through the exercise of due diligence and that the facts underlying the claim, if proven and viewed in the light of the evidence as a whole, would be sufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that, but for constitutional error, no reasonable fact finder would 7 have found the petitioner guilty of the underlying offense.5 Second, Magistrate Judge Durkin found that Zayas was raising a procedural due process claim, and was therefore required to exhaust administrative remedies as required by the INA, 8 U.S.C. SS 1105a, 1252(d), and that Zayas’s failure to perfect his appeal before the BIA constituted a failure to exhaust administrative remedies. On April 25, 2001, Judge Caputo adopted Magistrate Judge Durkin’s Report and Recommendation, but with certain modifications. First, Judge Caputo considered the applicability of the gatekeeping mechanism of S 2244(b) to habeas petitions filed pursuant to S 2241. Relying on decisions of the Seventh Circuit, Valona v. United States, 138 F.3d 693 (7th Cir. 1998), and the Ninth Circuit, Barapind v. Reno, 225 F.3d 1100 (9th Cir. 2000), Judge Caputo concluded that S 2241 petitions were not subject to S 2244(b)’s gatekeeping regime. Having concluded that S 2244(b) was inapplicable, Judge Caputo noted that the petition does raise an issue which could have been raised in his first petition. With matters in this posture, Judge Caputo concluded that the petition should be considered in the context of the Supreme Court decision of McCleskey [v. Zant, 499 U.S. 467 (1991)] for abusing the writ. Judge Caputo determined that Zayas was presenting in his Middle District petition an issue -- namely, a contention that the restrictions of the AEDPA should not have been retroactively applied -- that could have been raised in his first habeas petition in the Eastern District, that Zayas had failed to show any cause, prejudice or a fundamental miscarriage of justice for failing to include that argument in his first petition, and hence that the Middle District petition had to be dismissed for abuse of the writ. _________________________________________________________________ 5. Magistrate Judge Durkin also found Zayas’s Middle District petition barred by operation of Rule 9(b) of the Rules Governing S 2254 Cases. However, the District Court did not address Rule 9(b), and neither Zayas nor the government has referred to the Rule in the briefs submitted to this court; further, we have not found that our disposition of this appeal requires reference to the Rule. 8 Judge Caputo also found that the Middle District petition raised procedural due process questions and was therefore subject to dismissal for failure to exhaust administrative remedies. The dismissal of Zayas’s Middle District petition has given rise to the current appeal.