Opinion ID: 221394
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The district court erred when it placed the burden on Petitioner to prove his incompetence.

Text: We begin with the competency issue. We addressed the right of a death-sentenced state prisoner to be competent during his federal habeas proceeding in Gates, 334 F.3d at 807-17 and held that prisoners indeed enjoy such a right under the statute granting them the services of counsel, id. at 817. Unless such a prisoner has the capacity to understand his position and to communicate rationally with counsel, the district court must stay habeas proceedings until the prisoner regains that capacity. Id. at 819. The parties do not dispute Petitioner's right to be competent while his habeas petition is adjudicated. But they do dispute the proper procedures for determining Petitioner's competence. In particular, they quarrel about who bears the burden of proving their respective pointswhether Petitioner bears the burden of proving his incompetence, or the state bears the burden of proving Petitioner's competence. Petitioner relies for his position on our opinion in Mason ex rel. Marson v. Vasquez, 5 F.3d 1220, 1225 (9th Cir.1993), which involved a death-sentenced state prisoner who wanted to abandon his federal habeas petition during the course of those proceedings. His lawyer challenged his competency to do so. Id. at 1224. The district court convened a competency hearing and found that the petitioner competently had decided to withdraw his habeas petition. Id. The issue then came to us on appeal. Of the procedures to be used in determining someone's competence during habeas proceedings, we wrote: When a habeas petition has been filed in the federal district court, appropriately invoking the court's jurisdiction and the mental competency of the petitioner is reasonably questioned, it is the obligation of the court to determine the petitioner's mental competence. Initially sufficient evidence must be presented to cause the court to conduct an inquiry. After that point it is no one's burden to sustain, rather it is for the court to determine by a preponderance of the evidence whether the petitioner is mentally competent to withdraw his petition. Id. at 1225. Applying Mason here, the question for the district court would be whether a preponderance of the evidence established Petitioner's competence. If it did not, then Mason compels a finding of incompetence. As the state points out, however, that direction differs from Congress' instructions with respect to competency hearings held during federal criminal trials. Under 18 U.S.C. § 4241(d), a district court must find a criminal defendant incompetent when the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant is presently suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering him mentally incompetent. Those instructions apply [a]t any time after the commencement of a prosecution for an offense and prior to the sentencing of the defendant, or at any time after the commencement of probation or supervised release and prior to the completion of the sentence. Id. § 4241(a). Using Congress' rule, the question for the district court would be whether a preponderance of the evidence established Petitioner's incompetence. Otherwise, § 4241(d) compels a finding of competence. The district court chose to apply the competency standard for federal criminal trials, rather than the standard required by Mason for habeas petitioners and put Petitioner to the task of proving his incompetence. Finding this a close case in which [c]onsideration of the standard and burden ... is of great consequence, the court decided that Petitioner failed to carry his burden and found him to be competent. We cannot agree with its decision to apply the standards in § 4241(d). By its own terms, § 4241 does not apply unless a federal criminal defendant is on trial or is released on probation. Petitioner has been convicted and sentenced in state court. He has not been released on probation or otherwise. As Petitioner's circumstances plainly do not fall within the terms of § 4241(a), the procedures in § 4241(d) do not apply. The district court erred when it held otherwise. The state nevertheless urges us to confine Mason to its facts. According to the state's reading of Mason, we spoke only to the situation in which a possibly incompetent petitioner decides to abandon a habeas petition. That is, the state argues, Mason says nothing about a situation in which a possibly incompetent petitioner initiates or continues to pursue a habeas petition. That reading leaves us free, according to the state, to adopt the well-reasoned standards set out in § 4241, even if Congress did not intend for § 4241 to apply in these particular circumstances. We find the state's reading of Mason to be unduly narrow. Although Mason addressed a petitioner who wanted to abandon his petition, we did not qualify our holding to that limited situation. To the contrary, we framed our holding broadly, referring to any time [w]hen a habeas petition has been filed in the federal district court, appropriately invoking the court's jurisdiction. Mason, 5 F.3d at 1225. And we understood that our formulation of the burden of proof in the habeas context differed from the permissible burden in the context of a criminal trial, in which the Supreme Court has upheld a state's decision to place upon the party claiming incompetence the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant is incompetent. Id. (citing Medina v. California, 505 U.S. 437, 112 S.Ct. 2572, 120 L.Ed.2d 353 (1992)). Despite that difference, we thought that our formulation of the burden better fit the special context of federal habeas proceedings. In addition to noting the fact that the text of our holding in Mason applies in the present context, we observe that the logic of Mason applies here as well. Petitioner's decision to start or continue a federal habeas case is essentially equivalent to a decision to withdraw a federal habeas case, once begun; similarly, determining which claims to bring in a habeas petition and which to leave out requires no less competency than determining whether to withdraw a habeas petition. The same competency rule logically extends to both. We therefore hold that, when deciding whether Petitioner possessed the mental competence required under Gates, the district court had to use the procedure and apply the burden of proof that we prescribed in Mason. Not having done so, the court erred.