Opinion ID: 222088
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel During Trial and on Direct Appeal

Text: The district court concluded that all of Greenway's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, both at trial and on direct appeal, were procedurally barred by Arizona Criminal Procedure Rule 32.2(a)(3), which the district court found was consistently and regularly followed in Arizona and therefore constituted an independent and adequate ground upon which a procedural default may be found. Federal courts will not review a question of federal law decided by a state court if the decision of that court rests on a state law ground that is independent of the federal question and adequate to support the judgment. See Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 729, 111 S.Ct. 2546, 115 L.Ed.2d 640 (1991). To constitute an independent and adequate state procedural ground creating a procedural bar to consideration of claims in the federal court, a state rule must be clear, consistently applied, and well-established at the time of a petitioner's purported default. See Scott, 567 F.3d at 580. The general Arizona rule governing all procedural bars is Rule 32.2, which provides: a. Preclusion. A petitioner will not be given relief under this rule based upon any ground: (1) Still raisable on direct appeal under Rule 31 or on post-trial motion under Rule 24; (2) Finally adjudicated on the merits on appeal or in any previous collateral proceeding; (3) Knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently not raised at trial, on appeal, or in any previous collateral proceeding. Ariz. R.Crim. P. 32.2 (pre-1992) (emphasis added). [1] The state trial court and the district court relied upon Rule 32.2(a)(3), which bars claims not raised in previous post-conviction proceedings. The state trial court denied Greenway's attempts to reopen and amend the initial Rule 32 petition to include these ineffective assistance claims on the ground that the claims should have been brought in that petition when it was originally filed. Yet, Rule 32.2(a)(3) does not provide that petitions as originally filed cannot be amended. Indeed, Arizona has a procedural rule, Rule 32.6(d), which permits amendment of a Rule 32 Petition even if the petition has already been dismissed. See Scott, 567 F.3d at 577. Rule 32.2(a)(3) expressly bars only claims not brought in a previous collateral proceeding. In this case, Greenway was trying to amend his first petition, and there had been no earlier petition or collateral proceeding. We therefore conclude there was no previous collateral proceeding in which these claims should have been brought, because Greenway's first petition for post-conviction relief remained in state court proceedings while he sought to include additional claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. We trace the procedural history of this case to illustrate that Petitioner did what he could, and, indeed, what the state supreme court effectively told him to do, in order to litigate the claims in the first petition. Greenway, with new counsel, first moved to vacate the trial court's denial of his original Rule 32 petition, and to obtain leave from the trial court to amend that petition. When that motion was denied, Greenway filed a Petition for Special Action with the Arizona Supreme Court, asking that court to order the trial court to allow the filing of an amended petition. The Arizona Supreme Court declined jurisdiction of the Special Action, but did so without prejudice to Greenway's seeking reconsideration of the denial of the post-conviction petition before the state trial court, presumably in order to amend it. The state supreme court thus appeared to authorize Greenway to seek relief in the trial court by amending his first and only Rule 32 petition. Greenway did go back to the trial court to seek reconsideration and leave to amend his first petition to include, among other claims, claims of ineffective assistance of counsel at trial and on direct appeal. Greenway argued that the counsel who filed his initial post-conviction petition was ineffective because she missed one deadline after another, conducted no investigation to see if other meritorious claims could be raised, never met with Greenway to discuss his case, and even directed a non-attorney investigator to write the entire post-conviction petition, to which counsel then made no additions or modifications. As we recently recognized in Scott, Arizona Rules specifically allow the filing of an amended petition upon a showing of good cause, even after the trial court has already dismissed that petition. 567 F.3d at 577 (citing Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.6(d)). In this case, however, instead of determining whether Greenway had good cause to amend his petition, the state trial court, citing Rule 32.2(a)(3), denied those claims as procedurally barred because they had not been raised earlier. The state trial court thus failed to recognize the availability of the state procedural rule allowing the filing of an amended petition upon a showing of good cause. Since Arizona has a procedure for amending post-conviction relief petitions, the dismissal of claims as barred under a different rule, Rule 32.2(a)(3), cannot constitute an independent and adequate state ground barring the district court's consideration of these claims. Our opinion in Scott is instructive and controlling in key respects. In Scott, the original post-conviction petition for relief from Scott's conviction and capital sentence raised a single issue of ineffective assistance at sentencing. Scott, 567 F.3d at 578. While this petition was pending, Scott, like Greenway, sought to replace his post-conviction counsel. The trial court summarily denied the petition for post-conviction relief in a minute order, without a hearing with respect to the request for new counsel, just as the trial court did in this case. See id. Scott then filed a motion to represent himself and the court appointed new counsel. With new counsel, Scott, like Greenway, then filed motions to vacate the denial of the post-conviction petition and for leave to file an amended petition, arguing that his previous counsel had been ineffective. See id. at 578-79. The state court denied the motions. In an order remarkably similar to the trial court's ruling on the ineffectiveness claims sought to be added in this case, the court said it had no authority under Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.6(d) to allow the filing of an amended petition because the motion to amend was filed after the original petition had been denied. Id. at 579. Scott then filed a petition for review with the Arizona Supreme Court, which was summarily denied. See id. The federal district court then dismissed Scott's subsequent federal habeas petition, just as the district court dismissed Greenway's claims, because it found that the state court's denial of post-conviction relief was based on an adequate and independent rule of state procedure. See id. On appeal to this court, however, we reversed and remanded for a determination on the merits, holding that Rule 32.6(d) was not an adequate bar to federal review because the rule was not clear, well-established, nor consistently applied in Arizona. Id. at 581-82. We reviewed its history and concluded it had never been consistently applied to bar post-dismissal amendments to Rule 32 petitions. At least one Arizona appellate court had interpreted Rule 32.6(d) to allow the filing of an amended petition upon a showing of good cause, even if the trial court had already dismissed the original petition. Id. at 581 (citing State v. Rodriguez, 183 Ariz. 331, 903 P.2d 639, 641 (Ariz.Ct.App.1995)). Indeed, we found that the Arizona Supreme Court had subsequently followed Rodriguez and issued orders allowing defendants upon a showing of good cause to file amended or supplemental petitions even after their first petitions had been denied. Scott, 567 F.3d at 581 n. 7. We therefore concluded that reliance on Rule 32.6(d) was not an independent and adequate state ground that barred Scott's claims. In this case, as in Scott, the state court held that the new claims were brought too late without considering whether there was good cause to amend the petition. Here, the state court relied on Rule 32.2(a)(3) to bar Greenway's claims, a provision that, on its face, applies only where there has been a prior post-conviction proceeding. There was no such prior post-conviction proceeding in Greenway's case, for Greenway, like Scott, was trying to amend his first petition after it had been dismissed. The state supreme court itself effectively told Greenway to return to the trial court to seek amendment of his first petition when it declined to accept jurisdiction of his special action. Therefore, Rule 32.2(a)(3)'s bar of claims not raised in an earlier petition cannot constitute an adequate and independent ground sufficient to support a finding of procedural default, and particularly in light of Rule 32.6(d)'s provision allowing for amendments to Rule 32 petitions. See also Lambright v. Stewart, 241 F.3d 1201, 1203-06 (9th Cir.2001) (holding Rule 32.2(a)(3) does not bar federal habeas review of claims not raised in direct appeal in light of another Arizona rule prohibiting claims from being raised on direct appeal when they rely on evidence outside the record). The State cites a number of cases in which we recognized reliance on Rule 32.2(a)(3) to have been an independent and adequate state ground for the state courts' dismissal of claims. Yet none of those cases involved an attempt to amend a first Rule 32 petition. In those cases, the petitioner had filed an earlier Rule 32 post-conviction petition that had been conclusively ruled upon and become final. Thus those petitioners were trying to bring new claims before the state court in a successive petition. In Ortiz v. Stewart, 149 F.3d 923, 930 (9th Cir.1998), for example, we held that additional claims raised for the first time in petitioner's third post-conviction petition were procedurally defaulted. In Martinez-Villareal v. Lewis, 80 F.3d 1301, 1304-06 (9th Cir.1996), we determined that claims were barred because they were raised in second and third post-conviction petitions. The State cites no case in which we concluded Rule 32.2(a)(3) to be an independent and adequate state ground barring claims sought to be raised in state court through amendment of a first petition. Arizona has not consistently recognized any such bar, and its rules permit amendment. The district court erred in holding that Rule 32.2(a)(3) was an independent and adequate state ground that bars the consideration of Greenway's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel at the guilt phase of trial and on direct appeal. Greenway's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel during trial and on direct appeal of the state court proceedings are therefore remanded to the district court for consideration on the merits. On remand, the district court should consider those claims de novo because there is no state court determination on the merits to which the district court can defer. Scott, 567 F.3d at 584-85 (stating that when a state court has not reached the merits of a properly raised issue, we must review it de novo (quotation marks and citation omitted)).