Court Opinion

ID: 9498153
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:09:29.819633+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:39.108444
License: Public Domain

NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I would affirm the judgment of the district court, dismissing this habeas proceeding as untimely under AEDPA, 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1)(A), and therefore I respectfully dissent.
On December 14, 1989, Douglas Frasch was sentenced in a Maryland state court on his guilty plea to a charge of sexual assault. Frasch sought no direct review of his judgment of conviction within the 30 days allowed for appealing such judgments under Maryland procedure. Accordingly, Frasch’s judgment of conviction became final in January 1990.
Ten • years later — on December 13, 1999 — Frasch - first sought postconviction review in Maryland state court, contending that he. received ineffective assistance of counsel because his lawyer failed to appeal his guilty plea conviction. The Maryland court granted postconviction relief on October 3, 2000, allowing Frasch to file a belated application for leave to appeal his 1989 judgment of conviction to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
Frasch filed his application for leave to appeal within the 30 days allowed, and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals summarily denied his petition on July 9, 2001. Even though this appeal to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals was awarded as postconviction relief, Frasch treated it as a revived direct review and accordingly filed a- second postconviction motion .in state court on September 6, 2001. The state court denied his motion, and on December 10, 2002, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals denied Frasch leave to appeal the denial.
Frasch filed the habeas petition in this case on August 22, 2003, more than 13 years after his conviction became final, and more than 7 years after AEDPA, including its one-year statute of limitations for the filing -of a habeas petition in federal court, was enacted. See 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1)(A).
The majority concludes that because the Maryland courts granted Frasch postcon-viction relief- in October ' 2000, allowing Frasch to pursue a belated appeal, the statute of limitations for his ' petition in federal court runs from October 8, 2001— the date on which Frasch’s time to seek a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court expired — plus any time that Frasch used in pursuing his second postconviction relief. Although the majority recognizes that AEDPA establishes a one-year statute of limitations running from “the date *526on which the judgment [of conviction in state court] became final by the conclusion of direct review or the expiration of the time for seeking such review,'” 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1)(A) (emphasis added), it rules that the direct review process that had concluded in 1990 was somehow revived in 2000 by the state court’s grant of postcon-viction relief. The majority concludes therefore that when the revived direct review process concluded, the AEDPA clock started running again, making Frasch’s federal petition filed on August 22, 2003, timely.
The problem with the majority’s analysis is its conclusion that the relief granted through Maryland’s postconviction process revived Maryland’s direct review process that'had concluded 10 years earlier. The U.S. Supreme Court has instructed that, for purposes of interpreting how AEDPA interacts with such state procedural rules, we must “look to how a state procedure functions.” Carey v. Saffold, 536 U.S. 214, 223, 122 S.Ct. 2134, 153 L.Ed.2d 260 (2002). An examination of Maryland state law compels the conclusion that Maryland does not consider the rights granted to Frasch in this case to be a revival of Maryland’s direct review process. Rather, Maryland considers' the relief granted through a postconviction motion to be just that — postconvietion relief — even though that relief included a belated right of appeal. More specifically, the processes leading up to and following Frasch’s belated appeal leave no doubt that Frasch’s belated appeal functioned as part of Maryland’s postconviction relief process and not as a revival of its direct review process.
First, the process by which Frasch obtained a belated appeal indicates that it functioned to provide a remedy available under Maryland’s postconviction process, not as part of its direct review process. To obtain his right to file a belated appeal, Frasch filed a petition for postconviction relief in the trial court, the principal means by which defendants obtain belated appeals in Maryland. See Wilson v. State, 284 Md. 664, 399 A.2d 256, 262 (1979) (holding that the Maryland Post Conviction Procedure Act gives circuit courts the power to grant belated appeals as remedies for conviction errors); Michael v. State, 85 Md.App. 735, 584 A.2d 1317, 1318 (1991) (noting that Maryland’s rules of appellate procedure provide no mechanism for extending the 30-day period for filing a direct appeal and holding that, “in the absence of specific authority,” the appeals period may not be extended on direct review). In Wilson, the court explained that the purpose of the Maryland Post Conviction Procedure Act was “to bring together and consolidate in one simple statute all the remedies, beyond those that are incident to the usual procedures of trial and review, which are presently available for challenging the validity of a sentence.” Wilson, 399 A.2d at 262 (emphasis added). Thus, by recognizing that belated appeals are primarily available as remedies under the Post Conviction Procedure Act, the Maryland Court of Appeals acknowledged that the right to a belated appeal is outside the “direct review” process.
The majority argues that the process by which Frasch obtained the right to file a belated appeal is irrelevant to the question of whether the belated appeal itself constituted “direct review” because the pre-ap-peal process and the belated appeal took place in two separate proceedings. See ante at 524. The distinctness of the proceedings, however, only highlights the importance of examining the pre-appeal process. The central question in this case— that is, whether a belated appeal acts as “direct review”- — depends on how the belated appeal fits within the broader scheme of Maryland’s criminal justice system. Indeed, the very word “direct” demands an *527analysis of the relationship between the belated appeal and the procedures leading up to it. As explained above, the fact that Frasch had to go through Maryland’s post-conviction procedure to obtain a belated appeal — because he could not otherwise have obtained an extension of his time for filing a direct appeal — indicates that the belated appeal was not “direct[ly]” related to his initial conviction.
Second, the procedural posture of Frasch’s case after the conclusion of his belated appeal also demonstrates that the belated appeal was part of the postconviction process and not a revival of the direct review process, Maryland’s postconviction review statute provides that “[f]or each trial or sentence, a person may file one petition for relief under this title.” Md. Code Ann., Crim. Proc. § 7-103 (emphasis added). Thus, if a defendant files a timely appeal for direct review of his conviction and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals denies his appeal, the defendant still has an opportunity to assert error by filing a petition under the postconviction statute. In contrast, if the defendant, rather than pursuing a timely direct appeal, obtains a belated appeal by filing a postconviction petition, which the Court of Special Appeals denies, the petitioner is deemed to have used his one posteonviction petition unless he raised an additional point of error in his original petition. See Dixon v. State, 84 Md.App. 347, 579 A.2d 786, 788 (1990).
Here, in Frasch’s initial state postcon-viction petition, he asserted a number of claims in addition to the ineffective counsel claim that formed the basis for his right to file a belated appeal. Because those additional claims were not addressed in the initial postconviction proceeding, they retained their first-petition status, thus enabling Frasch to reassert them after the completion of the belated appeal. For all other allegations of error, however, Frasch’s first postconviction petition acted as a bar; having failed to raise them in the first petition, Frasch could not assert them after the belated appeal.
By stating that “[bjecause Frasch received the same collateral review he would have received had he timely filed his application for leave to appeal,” Frasch did not “end[ ] up in a different procedural posture,” see ante at 524, the majority lumps together Frasch’s procedural posture from before and after he obtained his belated appeal. While the sum of Frasch’s rights under the postconviction act was not affected by the belatedness of his appeal, his rights as they stood after the completion of the appeal were most definitely altered. After the completion of the belated appeal, Frasch could not raise any new grounds for relief in a postconviction petition; he was limited to asserting only those claims raised in his first petition. In contrast, after the completion of a timely appeal, had Frasch filed one, Maryland’s one-petition limit would not have constrained the grounds available for Frasch to raise in a postconviction petition. Thus, giving Frasch a belated appeal as part of his postconviction relief did not place him in the same procedural posture as if he had timely pursued direct review of his conviction, as he claims and the majority allows.
Because Maryland law treats belated appeals as remedies available under the Maryland Postconviction Procedure Act and because a petitioner who obtains a belated appeal through the postconviction process is not in the same procedural posture under Maryland procedure as a petitioner who files a timely direct appeal, Frasch’s belated appeal was not part of Maryland’s direct review process. That process ended in 1990 when Frasch’s judgment of conviction became final.
*528Accordingly, AEDPA’s statute of limitations for a- habeas petition relating to a final 1989 judgment began to run on April 24, 1996, AEDPA’s effective date, and expired on April 23, 1997, more than six years before Frasch actually filed the ha-beas petition in this case. Accordingly, it is'barred by § 2244(d)(1)(A).