Opinion ID: 766112
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus

Text: 17 In August 1997, Smalls filed this petition for a writ of habeas corpus, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §2254, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Smalls claimed that the trial court's supplemental charge improperly instructed jurors that they had a responsibility to convince the others and that the charge failed to instruct them that they were not to abandon their conscientiously held views. In an opinion dated May 19, 1998, the district court granted Smalls' request for a writ, holding that the Allen charge was coercive and violated his right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the error was not harmless. See Smalls, 6 F.Supp.2d at 222-23. 18 On June 11, 1998, the state filed both a notice of appeal and a motion to vacate the judgment of the district court pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(4). We dismissed the appeal for failure to secure a certificate of appealability and later vacated that order and reinstated the state's appeal. 19 The district court then addressed the state's Rule 60(b) motion, which argued that the district court lacked jurisdiction because Smalls could not be deemed in custody from his 1987 robbery conviction at the time his petition was filed because that sentence would have expired on March 24, 1993. 2 In response, Smalls asserted that he was in custody because he was serving three aggregate sentences for subsequent crimes committed in 1991 and 1994. Indeed, the state conceded this fact by providing record evidence from the Department of Correctional Services, which calculated that Smalls was serving the aggregate of his 1987, 1991 and 1994 sentences since his return to the Department of Correctional Services in 1994. 20 The district court denied the motion, 3 adopting the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Garlotte v. Fordice, 515 U.S. 39 (1995), which articulated that `a prisoner serving consecutive sentences is in custody under any one of them' for purposes of the habeas statute. Id. at 45 (quoting Peyton v. Rowe, 391 U.S. 54, 67 (1968)). The district court concluded that [b]ecause the records submitted reflect that Smalls was serving the aggregate of his 1987, 1991, and 1994 sentences from 1994 to the present, he was `in custody' within the meaning of §§2241(c)(3) and 2254(a) on the 1987 conviction at the time he filed his petition for habeas relief. Smalls v. Batista, 22 F.Supp.2d 230, 234 (S.D.N.Y. 1998). 21 The state then filed an amended notice of appeal. While that notice added the denial of the Rule 60(b) motion as an issue on appeal, the state failed to argue that issue in its brief or at oral argument, and we consider the issue abandoned. 4 22 We have appellate jurisdiction to hear this appeal under 28 U.S.C. §2253.