Court Opinion

ID: 9495034
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:53:03.201266+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:46.796179
License: Public Domain

O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
I concur in Parts I and III of the court’s opinion affirming the district court’s denial of Charles Harvey Joseph Franklin’s § 2254 habeas petition. I agree that the representation Franklin received, while below our reasonableness standard, did not entitle him to habeas relief. However, because the issue of whether the State waived its procedural default argument is more complicated than the majority allows, I cannot join Part II of the court’s opinion.
I
The court speculates that while a “state shall not be deemed to have waived the exhaustion requirement ... unless the state, through counsel, expressly waives *1238[it],” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(3) (emphasis added), the State can waive its procedural bar argument on appeal by failing to raise it in the district court. Quite simply, the majority’s analysis of § 2254(b)(3) elevates form over substance by failing to recognize that here the State’s procedural bar argument necessarily rests upon Franklin’s failure to exhaust his claim in state court.
At bottom, the State argues that Franklin failed to exhaust his claim in state court, and, therefore, by function of Oregon law,1 it is proeedurally barred from our consideration. See Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 735 n. 1, 111 S.Ct. 2546, 115 L.Ed.2d 640 (1991) (If “the court to which petitioner would be required to present his claims in order to meet the exhaustion requirement would now find the claims proeedurally barred,” the petitioner has committed a “procedural default for purposes of federal habeas.”). There could be no procedural bar argument in this case without Franklin’s failure first to exhaust his claim. Thus, because the State’s argument is based upon Franklin’s failure to exhaust his claim, which, as a by-product, renders it proeedurally barred for our purposes, I would hold that the State did not waive this argument by failing to raise it below. The majority’s opinion is able to dance around § 2254(b)(3)’s clear mandate only by failing to recognize the true form of the State’s argument.
II
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that a “procedural bar” can encompass two different scenarios. The first is illustrated by this case: Franklin failed to exhaust his claim in state court, and now, even if he returned to state court, it would turn him away. As a result, his claim is proeedurally barred in federal court. See Coleman, 501 U.S. at 735 n. 1, 111 S.Ct. 2546. The second scenario encompassed by “procedural bar” occurs not when a habeas petitioner fails to exhaust his claim in state court, but rather when the state court will not hear his claim due to a state procedural bar. For example, if at his state trial Franklin failed to object to the admission of evidence that allegedly violates due process, and state law provided that the failure to lodge a contemporaneous objection to the admission of evidence constitutes a procedural bar for state court purposes, then we, too, would find Franklin’s claim proeedurally barred in the federal habeas context (if, of course, the state law constituted an adequate and independent state ground to proeedurally bar petitioner’s claim). See id. at 731-32, 111 S.Ct. 2546.
In the second scenario, the exhaustion requirement does not come into play. It is not that a petitioner failed to exhaust his claim; rather, it is that the state court system, based on its own procedural rules, will not hear it. In this instance, I would hold § 2254(b)(3) inapplicable. Or, put another way, a State can waive this type of procedural bar on appeal by failing to raise it in the district court. This is not so, however, in the first scenario, where the procedural bar argument rests entirely upon and cannot exist independent from the petitioner’s failure to exhaust.
The majority cites Jackson v. Johnson, 194 F.3d 641 (5th Cir.1999), to support its holding, but that case does not undermine my analysis. Jackson dealt with the second type of procedural bar I described above, ie., that which does not involve a petitioner’s failure to exhaust. Id. at 651-52. Jackson recognizes, and I agree, that the “exhaustion requirement is related but distinct from that of procedural default,” id. at 652 n. 35, but this observation is not determinative for § 2254(b)(3) purposes when the petitioner’s failure to exhaust has *1239the incidental consequence of proeedurally barring his claim in federal court. The majority’s reading of Jackson ignores this nuanced, but important, distinction.
Finally, I note that as a practical matter, the court’s “discussion” of this issue in Part II is just as the majority recognizes— “discussion.” Supra at 1233. It is unnecessary to its holding, see 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(2) (“An application for a writ of habeas corpus may be denied on the merits, notwithstanding the failure of the applicant to exhaust the remedies available in the courts of the State.”), and, thus, dictum.
Ill
Because this case involves a procedural bar in name only, and actually is based upon Franklin’s failure to exhaust his claims in state court, I believe that § 2254(b)(3) applies to protect the State from its failure to raise this argument in the district court. As such, I would hold Franklin’s claim proeedurally barred and affirm the denial of his habeas petition on that ground. In any event, I do agree that, on the merits of his claim, he did not receive unconstitutionally deficient representation.
For that reason, I respectfully concur in Parts I and III of the opinion and concur in the judgment.

. See Or.Rev.Stat. § 138.550(3).