Court Opinion

ID: 9846663
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:45:02.376142+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:19:42.508041
License: Public Domain

CHAGARES, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority opinion makes our Court the first to prohibit a district court from dismissing a petition for writ of habeas corpus immediately upon determining that the petitioner exhausted none — not a single one — of his federal claims in state court. I believe that this holding constitutes an unwarranted extension of Supreme Court precedent. In particular, I believe that the majority improperly intuits a sub silentio overruling of Rose v. Lundy, 455 U.S. 509, 102 S.Ct. 1198, 71 L.Ed.2d 379 (1982) from dicta in Pace v. DiGuglielmo, 544 U.S. 408, 125 S.Ct. 1807, 161 L.Ed.2d 669 (2005). Therefore, I respectfully dissent.
I.
A.
Until recently, it had been the rule that a district court must dismiss a habeas petition containing at least one unexhausted claim, that is, one claim that has not been subjected to one full round of state-court review. See Lundy, 455 U.S. at 515, 522; Slutzker v. Johnson, 393 F.3d 373, 379 (3d Cir.2004) (“Under the doctrine of ... Rose v. Lundy ..., federal courts must dismiss without prejudice habeas petitions that contain any unexhausted *194claims.”). This rule was established at a time when there was no statute of limitations governing habeas petitions. See Rhines v. Weber, 544 U.S. 269, 274, 125 S.Ct. 1528, 161 L.Ed.2d 440 (2005). The Lundy Court, in crafting this rule, relied at least partly upon the assumption that such a rule would not greatly prejudice a petitioner who came to federal court with some exhausted claims and some unexhausted claims — a so-called “mixed” petition. See id. at 273-74. A petitioner who filed a mixed petition could, with relative ease, return to state court as needed until he completed the exhaustion process and then go back to federal court to file one wholly exhausted petition. See id. at 274 (citing Slack v. McDaniel, 529 U.S. 473, 486, 120 S.Ct. 1595, 146 L.Ed.2d 542 (2000)).
The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (“AEDPA”) made this assumption less plausible. It codified the Lundy exhaustion rule, see Rhines, 544 U.S. at 274 (“AEDPA preserved Lundy's total exhaustion requirement .... ”), and it imposed a one-year limitations period that runs from the date the state conviction becomes final. 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d). This period is tolled during the pendency of any properly filed petition for state post-conviction review, but it is not tolled while the federal petition pends in district court. § 2244(d)(2). The Rhines Court explained why AEDPA’s statute of limitations may undermine the assumption underlying the Lundy rule. See 544 U.S. at 275. Suppose that a prisoner files a timely federal petition. Suppose further that, after the AEDPA limitations period has expired, the district court rules that some of the claims made in that petition have not been exhausted. The Lundy rule would require the district court to dismiss the petition. But, because the statute of limitations was not tolled while the district court was reviewing the petition, the petitioner cannot, after returning to state court to exhaust those claims, file a single, completely exhausted, federal petition. See id. Those claims would be time-barred. See id.
The Rhines Court crafted a narrow exception to Lundy with respect to mixed petitions. See id. at 277. The Court held, contrary to Lundy, that a district court need not dismiss a petition it determines is mixed. See id. Rather, it may, if the petitioner shows, inter alia, good cause for failing to exhaust completely, stay disposition of the exhausted claims and hold the petition in abeyance while the petitioner completes the exhaustion process. See id. at 277-78. Once the petitioner fully exhausts his claims, the district court may then lift the stay and review the petition. See id.
B.
Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(2), a “properly filed” state post-conviction review petition tolls the one-year AEDPA statute of limitations governing habeas petitions. In Pace, the Court was “require[d] ... to decide whether a state post-conviction petition rejected by the state court as untimely nonetheless is ‘properly filed’ within the meaning of § 2244(d)(2).” 544 U.S. at 410. The Court held that such a state filing is not “properly filed” and therefore does not toll the one-year limitations period governing federal petitions. See id.
The Court explained that it reached this result by interpreting the statutory phrase “properly filed” according to its “common understanding” and in a way that would not turn the tolling provision “into a de facto extension mechanism.” Id. at 413. The Court then addressed and rejected two of the petitioner’s counterarguments. See id. at 414-17.
*195The Court then paused to acknowledge that its holding may present difficulties for certain petitioners. In particular, “a petitioner trying in good faith to exhaust state remedies may litigate in state court for years only to find out at the end that he was never ‘properly filed,’ and thus that his federal habeas petition is time barred.” Id. at 416 (quotation marks omitted) (citation to petitioner’s brief omitted). The Court offered a suggestion as to how such a petitioner might be able to solve this problem:
A prisoner seeking state post-conviction relief might avoid this predicament, however, by filing a “protective” petition in federal court and asking the federal court to stay and abey the federal habeas proceedings until state remedies are exhausted. See Rhines v. Weber, ante, at 278. A petitioner’s reasonable confusion about whether a state filing would be timely will ordinarily constitute “good cause” for him to file in federal court. Ibid. (“[I]f the petitioner had good cause for his failure to exhaust, his unexhausted claims are potentially meritorious, and there is no indication that the petitioner engaged in intentionally dilatory tactics,” then the district court likely “should stay, rather than dismiss, the mixed petition.”).
Id. at 416-17 (alteration in original).
II.
The District Court denied Heleva’s motion for stay because it held that stay-and-abeyance applies only to mixed petitions, and not to Heleva’s petition, which contained no exhausted claims. The majority holds that this was error, because even though the Court in Rhines did not overrule Lundy with respect to wholly unexhausted petitions, the Court in Pace did so through the solitary snippet quoted above. For the reasons that follow, I cannot agree.1
*196A.
The analysis must begin with the presumption that the Supreme Court does not overrule prior precedent sub silentio. See, e.g., Shalala v. Ill. Council on Long Term Care, Inc., 529 U.S. 1, 18, 120 S.Ct. 1084, 146 L.Ed.2d 1 (2000) (“The Court does not normally overturn, or so dramatically limit, earlier authority sub silentio.”); Am. Trucking Ass’ns v. Smith, 496 U.S. 167, 190, 110 S.Ct. 2323, 110 L.Ed.2d 148 (1990) (rejecting argument that, if accepted, would'constitute “sub silentio overruling]” of prior Court precedent). This presumption operates even when other decisions have undermined the rationale behind the precedent at issue. See Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 237, 117 S.Ct. 1997, 138 L.Ed.2d 391 (1997).
Further, the Supreme Court “does not decide important questions of law by cursory dicta inserted in unrelated cases.” Permian Basin Area Rate Cases, 390 U.S. 747, 775, 88 S.Ct. 1344, 20 L.Ed.2d 312 (1968). Accordingly, it is clear that “dicta does not and cannot overrule established Supreme Court precedent.” Waine v. Sacchet, 356 F.3d 510, 517 (4th Cir.2004); see S.F. NAACP v. S.F. Unified Sch. Dist., 284 F.3d 1163, 1167 (9th Cir.2002) (holding that the language in one Supreme Court decision “is dicta and should not be taken to overrule the express holding of [another Supreme Court decision]”).
If the Pace Court did indeed overrule Lundy, it did so sub silentio and in dicta. The overruling would certainly be sub silentio. After all, the Court in Pace never expressly stated that it was eroding Lundy in any way. And the overruling would come via dicta. Excising Pace's passage about protective petitions from the opinion does not call into question the Court’s holding — that a filing untimely under state law is not “properly filed” within the meaning of § 2244(d)(2) — which the Court expressly indicated it reached by considering the plain meaning of the tolling provision and the danger of that provision functioning as a “de facto extension mechanism.” See 544 U.S. at 413, 417. The Court’s advice to a petitioner on how to mitigate potential “[un]fairness” was not necessary to its ultimate resolution of the issue presented. See Drelles v. Metro. Life Ins. Co., 357 F.3d 344, 347-48 (3d Cir.2003) (“As defined by this Court, dictum is ‘a statement in a judicial opinion that could have been deleted without seriously impairing the analytical foundations of the holding.’ ” (quoting McDonald v. Master Fin., Inc., 205 F.3d 606, 612 (3d Cir.2000))); see also Carter v. Friel, 415 F.Supp.2d 1314, 1317 (D.Utah 2006) (noting language from Pace quoted by majority in the present case is dicta); Harris v. Beard, 393 F.Supp.2d 335, 339 (E.D.Pa. 2005) (same).
The majority therefore must overcome two weighty presumptions — one against Supreme Court sub silentio overruling, and the other against Supreme Court die-ta-based overruling — in holding that the Pace Court rendered Lundy inapplicable to wholly unexhausted petitions. See In re Sealed Case No. 98-3077, 151 F.3d 1059, 1064 (D.C.Cir.1998) (per curiam) (noting that “it is rather implausible that the Supreme Court, in dicta ... meant to overrule sub silentio the holdings in [two cases]”). I believe that the majority has failed to do this.
B.
The language of Pace does not suggest (much less compel) Lundy's, overruling. *197The Court’s citations to Rhines do not indicate that the stay-and-abeyance procedure announced in Rhines applies to any petition other than a mixed petition. In the passage at issue, the Court in Pace suggested a way to mitigate potential unfairness by noting that a prisoner in the “predicament” the Court described may seek a stay to the extent Rhines permits. To that end, the passage’s first citation to Rhines does not expand the scope of stay- and-abeyance, it merely functions as a useful shorthand indicating when stay-and-abeyance is available. The passage’s second citation to Rhines supports this reading. In the parenthetical attached to that citation, the Pace Court quoted the Rhines Court’s reference to a “mixed petition.” 544 U.S. at 416-17. Had the Pace Court wanted to demonstrate that stay-and-abeyance applies broadly, it could have excised the word “mixed” from that parenthetical, or it could have paraphrased (rather than quoted) the Rhines opinion. Yet it did neither.
In addition, reading the Court in Pace to have overruled Lundy sub silentio and in dicta is especially problematic because to overrule Lundy is not simply to tinker with a minor, hyper-technical facet of habeas corpus law. To overrule Lundy is to overhaul the Court’s exhaustion jurisprudence. Specifically, the majority reads Pace to provide that a district court no longer must dismiss a petition filed by a state prisoner who failed to present even one of his claims for relief to the state courts. I do not. Had the Supreme Court actually disturbed such a venerable part of habeas corpus, see Ex parte Royall, 117 U.S. 241, 251, 6 S.Ct. 734, 29 L.Ed. 868 (1886) — a part of habeas corpus that derives from the fundamental notion of comity between state and federal courts, see O’Sullivan v. Boerckel, 526 U.S. 838, 844-45, 119 S.Ct. 1728, 144 L.Ed.2d 1 (1999) (citing, inter alia, Lundy, 455 U.S. at 515—16) — it would have done so expressly.
Put simply, the Court in Pace gave no indication that it overruled Lundy with respect to wholly unexhausted petitions, much less enough of an indication to overcome the presumptions against sub silentio and dicta-based Supreme Court overruling. Therefore, I cannot agree with the majority that the Pace Court remade exhaustion law surreptitiously, in a paragraph peripheral to its holding.2
^
I believe that the Lundy Court’s command to dismiss wholly unexhausted petitions remains good law. Therefore, I believe that courts must continue to follow that command.3
*198III.
For the above reasons, I respectfully dissent, and would affirm the judgment of the District Court.

. I agree with my learned colleagues' rejection of Heleva’s argument, see Heleva Br. 12-14, that the Rhines Court itself overruled Lundy with respect to wholly unexhausted petitions. The Rhines Court determined that "[a]ny solution to th[e] problem [created by the interaction of Lundy and AEDPA's statute of limitations] must ... be compatible with AEDPA’s purposes,” namely, to "reduce delays” in the implementation of criminal sentences and to encourage prisoners to seek relief in state court before filing a federal petition. See 544 U.S. at 276-77 (citation omitted). Heleva argues that reading Rhines to allow district courts to stay and hold in abeyance wholly unexhausted petitions would do no more violence to these goals than would allowing courts to stay and hold in abeyance mixed petitions only. Heleva Br. 13. This is plainly incorrect. Rhines weakened the prisoner’s incentive to exhaust all claims before filing a federal petition, but preserved his incentive to exhaust at least some. Reading Rhines to encompass wholly unexhausted petitions, however, would weaken both of those incentives, not just the former.
But there are more reasons why Rhines itself does not encompass wholly unexhausted petitions. For starters, the Rhines Court expressly limited the breadth of its decision by stating, very precisely, the issue it addressed:
We confront here the problem of a "mixed” petition for habeas corpus relief in which a state prisoner presents a federal court with a single petition containing some claims that have been exhausted in the state courts and some that have not. More precisely, we consider whether a federal district court has discretion to stay the mixed petition to allow the petitioner to present his unexhausted claims to the state court in the first instance, and then to return to federal court for review of his perfected petition.
544 U.S. at 271-72. In addition, the Court underscored the narrowness of its holding by repeatedly acknowledging that it was only considering the mixed-petition context. See id. at 275, 277-78. Finally, in a subsequent case, the Court discussed Rhines and characterized it as a case about mixed petitions: “as we recently held, a court presented with a mixed habeas petition 'should allow the petitioner to delete the unexhausted claims and to proceed with the exhausted claims....' *196Rhines, supra, at 278.” Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199, 222, 127 S.Ct. 910, 166 L.Ed.2d 798(2007).

. It is also worth noting that this Court, in at least one post-Pace decision, has implied that Lundy is still good law with respect to wholly unexhausted petitions. For example, in Goldblum v. Klem, we noted that "'Rose v. Lundy requires a petitioner to either fully exhaust all claims prior to filing a petition or to raise both exhausted and unexhausted claims in the first habeas petition.’ ” 510 F.3d 204, 224 (3d Cir.2007) (quoting Benchoff v. Colleran, 404 F.3d 812, 820 (3d Cir.2005)). This suggests that Lundy requires that a petition filed by a prisoner who does neither of these things — that is, who fails to exhaust any claim in the petition — must be dismissed.

. Accordingly, the only court of appeals to have confronted the issue in a precedential opinion disagreed with today's majority. Rasberry v. Garcia, 448 F.3d 1150, 1152, 1154 (9th Cir.2006) ("Once a district court determines that a habeas petition contains only unexhausted claims .... it may simply dismiss the habeas petition for failure to exhaust.”). Rasberry, a state prisoner, filed a wholly unexhausted habeas petition. The record indicated, however, that he easily could have filed a mixed petition, because he had available to him additional claims which would have been deemed exhausted. See id. at 1153. The district court dismissed the petition for failure to exhaust. See id. at *1981152. Rasberry returned to state court and exhausted all the claims made in the federal petition that the district court dismissed. Id. He then filed a second petition, styled as an “amended” petition, which the district court dismissed as untimely under the AEDPA statute of limitations. Id. at 1152-53. Rasberry appealed that dismissal.
On appeal, Rasberry argued that the district court should not have dismissed his second petition as untimely because the AEDPA statute of limitations was equitably tolled during the pendency of his first petition. See id. at 1153. Rasberry argued that an "extraordinary circumstance” prevented him from filing his second petition on time. Id. This "extraordinary circumstance,” Rasberry asserted, was the district court’s failure to alert him to the exhausted claims he could have included, to instruct him to amend his petition to include those claims, and then to advise him to request that the district court stay disposition of the exhausted claims and hold the petition in abeyance while he returned to state court to complete the exhaustion process. See id. The court of appeals affirmed the dismissal and rejected Rasberry's equitable tolling argument. The court held that what Rasberry characterized as an "extraordinary circumstance” was not one, because the district court had no obligation to provide, sua sponte, the guidance he desired. Id. at 1153-54.
The court added that the district court had no obligation to hold Rasberry’s first, wholly unexhausted, petition in abeyance. Id. at 1154. Indeed, the court noted that the district court lacked the discretion to do so because, as a threshold matter, the stay-and-abeyance procedure announced in Rhines applies only to mixed petitions. Id. The district court had no power to employ this procedure even though the record indicated that Rasberry could have included some exhausted claims in his first petition, but did not. Id. Heleva, by contrast, never contends that he could have included any such claims. In other words, nothing about Heleva’s petition was exhausted — not the claims he actually included, and not the claims he could have included. Under Rasberry, then, Heleva's argument that the District Court had the discretion to hold his petition in abeyance would fail a fortiori.
The majority acknowledges Rasberry, but unduly minimizes its import. First, the majority asserts that the Rasberry court’s conclusion that the district court lacked the discretion to hold Rasberry’s wholly unexhausted petition in abeyance has no relevance here, because Rasberry, unlike Heleva, never argued that he met the Rhines “good cause” requirement. I disagree. According to the Rasberry court, the district court lacked the discretion to hold Rasberry’s wholly unexhausted petition in abeyance not because Rasberry failed to assert “good cause,” but because, as a categorical matter, stay-and-abeyance applies only to mixed petitions. See id. at 1154. The Rasberry court's conclusion, then, directly supports the District Court’s dismissal of Heleva’s wholly unexhausted petition.
Second, the majority appears to suggest that whatever the Rasberry court decided should be viewed with some skepticism because the court failed to cite Pace in its stay- and-abeyance discussion. But what reason did the court have to cite Pace in discussing the availability of stay-and-abeyance? As set forth above, the Pace Court did not make the Rhines stay-and-abeyance procedure more widely available, because the Pace Court did not alter the Lundy dismissal rule. The Rasberry court evidently recognized this and felt no need to reference, in its discussion of stay- and-abeyance, a case having no bearing upon the circumstances under which a district court may use that procedure.