Court Opinion

ID: 9488399
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:44:02.985929+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:51.861870
License: Public Domain

SAROKIN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result, because no matter how unconscionable the delay in the state proceedings, I agree that they cannot be ignored once they finally take place. See Walker v. Vaughn, 53 F.3d 609 (3d Cir.1995). Furthermore, while I recognize the purpose and propriety of the district court encouraging and even coercing the state court to take action, I believe that a time comes when enough is enough. A petitioner is entitled to have his claim that exhaustion of state court *596remedies should be excused adjudicated as of the time his petition is filed. In this matter, the petitioner had been waiting four years for a decision on his postconviction petition before the state court. Significantly, when Carter filed his federal habeas petition the state court had not even begun to process the posteonvietion petition and, in fact, its clerk’s office had lost Carter’s petition. Nonetheless, it was appropriate for the district court in the interests of comity to afford a further and reasonable opportunity for the state to act. However, in this instance the district court afforded an additional two years. In my view that further delay required that the interests of comity yield to the rights of the petitioner. He was entitled to have an adjur dication that the exhaustion requirement was excused and to receive a determination on the merits of his petition.
However, having finally received a state adjudication, and having failed to appeal therefrom, I concur in the order of remand, although I recognize that the history of this petitioner’s treatment in the state courts might well excuse and explain his failure to appeal a decision in state court which came six years after he moved in state court and two years after he filed his petition in federal court. I do not think that comity necessarily requires us to await a state court so unmindful of the rights of a convicted criminal defendant to have a speedy adjudication of his postconviction claims.