Court Opinion

ID: 9498248
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:11:58.916188+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:42.371220
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Gaston murdered a man in the summer of 1992, and was convicted of the murder in 1994. Yet now, more than a decade later, he is still litigating his case. Congress tried to put a stop to this sort of endless habeas litigation by imposing a one-year statute of limitations, which is reasonably tolled while a prisoner is exhausting his state remedies, but we have to a considerable extent gutted that statute. Today, we punch a new hole in the statute of limitations.
The majority has done a commendable job of figuring out what Gaston’s many pro se filings are trying to say. Part of the error in the majority opinion is compelled by circuit law that I think is mistaken. But the majority also makes what I believe is a new mistake. That mistake is treating the statute of limitations as tolled pending state exhaustion, when, instead of going “up the ladder” from the California Superi- or Court, to the Court of Appeal, to the Supreme Court, the petitioner goes up, down, and sideways. This new mistake puts today’s decision in tension, if not in conflict, with three other decisions of this court.
I concur in most of the majority opinion, and speak here only to the aspects of the tolling issue with which I disagree.
Duration of the gaps between petitions
Gaston had gaps of approximately nine and ten months, specifically 282 days and 307 days, when he had nothing pending anywhere in the California courts. The statute of limitations says that time is tolled when a properly filed application for post-conviction relief is “pending” in state court. Nothing was pending during the long periods between Gaston’s petitions. Nevertheless, our decision in Chavis v. LeMarque,1 which came down after our original panel decision in this case, now compels us to treat even a three-year gap between filings when nothing is pending as though something actually were pending, so long as the subsequent state application for post conviction relief was denied on grounds other than untimeliness.2 Chavis strikes me as bad law. If the state court concludes that the state petition was untimely, “that is the end of the matter,” *1047under Pace v. DiGuglielmo,3 but, as the Supreme Court decision in Carey v. Saffold4 points out, a state court decision rejecting a petition on the merits does not imply that the petition was timely.5 Nevertheless, if Chavis stands, then Gaston is entitled to the fiction that his state applications were “pending” during the nine and ten month periods when they were not. Evidently, filings within three years of dismissals are timely enough to keep a petition “pending” under our circuit’s law, unless a state court expressly states that the petition is “untimely.”6
Up, down, and sideways
Gaston was popping petitions all over the California court system. The panel’s decision to treat his petitions as maintaining “one complete round” of “pending” post-conviction relief is contrary to circuit law. This mistake is new to Ninth Circuit law.
In a typical state system, a prisoner may file a petition for a state writ of habeas corpus or other post-conviction relief in the state trial court of general jurisdiction. If he loses, he can appeal to the state intermediate appellate court, and then if he loses there, he can petition for review to the state supreme court. Obviously, the state proceedings are pending between the time of filing and the time of decision. But what about the time between a decision in a lower court and the filing of an appeal or petition for review in the next court up? Fairness and the policy requiring exhaustion in state court require that the time during these intervals — typically controlled by a rule or statute providing for perhaps thirty days — is treated as though a properly filed application was “pending.” Otherwise, time would accumulate against the short, one-year statute of limitations while the prisoner was giving the state’s appellate courts a chance to correct any error the trial court may have made.
California is different from a typical state in form, but not function. A prisoner files his petition in the state superior court, but if he loses, he does not “appeal” to the state’s intermediate appellate court. Instead he files a new petition there. And instead of being limited to thirty or some other fixed number of days, he is limited to a “reasonable time.” Likewise, if he loses at the intermediate appellate court, he can file a new petition within a reasonable time in the state supreme court. As the Supreme Court said in Saffold, “California’s collateral review process functions very much like that of other states, but for the fact that its timeliness rule is indeterminate.”7 The prisoner, Saffold explains, properly “ ‘invokes one complete round of the State’s established appellate review process’ ” to exhaust his claim.8
So, leaving out the timeliness problem, which is solved for Gaston by Chavis, did he follow the procedure recognized by Saffold as analogous to the usual state procedure? Not at all. He started in the middle, at the Court of Appeal. Then he went downstairs instead of upstairs, to the Superior Court. Then he went upstairs skipping a floor, to the Supreme Court. Then *1048he went down two floors to the Superior Court. Then he went one flight up, to the Court of Appeal, and then another flight, to the Supreme Court.9 When he went downstairs instead of upstairs, from the Court of Appeal to the Superior Court, he had deviated from the “one complete round of the State’s established appellate review process” he was entitled to. The one-year period given to Gaston by AED-PA to exhaust his state remedies started in April 1996, when the Court of Appeal’s denial of his petition became final. He did not file another petition until his trip downstairs to the Superior Court in July 1997. Had he been pursuing “one complete round of the State’s established appellate review process” during that year, the statute of limitations would be tolled, but he was not pursuing anything during the long gaps between his filings. Even if the long fallow periods are ignored under Chavis, Gaston went the wrong way. A prisoner making “one complete round of the State’s established appellate review process” has to go upstairs, not downstairs, at each step. Otherwise, his course makes no sense, because a lower court cannot reverse a higher court.
We issued a trilogy of cases on the up, down, and sideways problem: Biggs v. Duncan,10 King v. Roe,11 and Delhomme v. Ramirez.12 Biggs holds that when a prisoner who had filed habeas petitions in the Superior Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court, then filed another one in the Superior Court, he thereby “kicked off a new round” and the AEDPA limitations period is only tolled for one round.13 Biggs emphasizes that during the state exhaustion process, a California petition is “pending” only “during the ‘intervals between a lower court decision and filing of a new petition in a higher court.’ ” 14 Biggs quoted this phrase from the Supreme Court decision in Saffold, adding the emphasis to the words “lower” and “higher.” The panel in Biggs noted that the petition remained pending “while he worked his way up the ladder,” but not when he filed in the Superior Court after his Supreme Court filing, because then he was not going “up the ladder.” Circuit law under Biggs is that a new petition filed down the ladder, instead of up, is not part of the “one full round” a petitioner gets in state court, so the period between the higher court dismissal and the lower court filing is not a time when a petition is “pending” in state court.
In King, the petitioner’s subsequent petitions did not merely remedy deficiencies in his first petition or elaborate upon the facts relevant to his claims in his first petition, so we held that they were not part of his “one full round” and his one-year period expired despite their pen-dency.15 In Delhomme, while the prisoner’s petitions were pending in their respec*1049tive up-the-ladder courts during his one full round, he filed additional overlapping petitions — sideways in the same court and down the ladder in lower courts.16 We held that tolling nevertheless saved him from the one-year bar.17 The reason was not that the up, down, and sideways petitions tolled the statute, as the majority decides today. Instead, we held in Delhom-me that the up, down, and sideways petitions were mere noise, with “no effect on the already pending application,” because he still had his “one complete round” pending while he filed the extraneous petitions.18 Gaston, by contrast, did not. His one complete round was all over, except for the part on which he procedurally defaulted (a petition to the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeal dismissed his petition), when he went downstairs to the Superior Court.
The majority summarizes Gaston’s claims, showing that his second application included some of the claims in his first application, but not all, and included some new claims, that his third application included only an entirely different claim, and that his fourth, fifth and sixth applications included some claims from his first, some from his second, and many claims that were in neither. But then it concludes, despite our authority to the contrary, that “Gaston did not complete a full round of habeas review until the California Supreme Court denied his sixth and final habeas application.”
Gaston had nothing actually pending in any court during the entire year from when the statute began to run, April 24, 1996, to when the one year period ended, April 24, 1997. The only way his third, fourth, fifth, and sixth petitions matter is if he, by legal fiction, is treated as though he had something pending during that year when he did not, because he was completing his “one full round.”
Had Gaston filed a second, remedial, petition in the Court of Appeal after that court denied his first petition for “lack of adequate record” on February 27, 1996, or had he remedied the defect in his record and gone “up the ladder,” as Biggs and King put it, then he would have been completing his one full round. By going down the ladder with a different set of claims, he “kicked off a new round” and the AEDPA limitations period is only tolled for one round. Unlike the petitioner in Delhomme, he did not have his “one full round” still going on while he made his sundry filings. Gaston’s round was all done when the Court of Appeal denied his petition in February 1996, because he never remedied its deficiencies or refiled that petition in a higher court.
The majority says that even if Gaston’s fourth petition in Superior Court was the start of a new round, it would not matter under Delhomme because his first round was still going on. That would be so under Delhomme only if his first round really was going on. He could have kept it going by a renewed petition in the Court of Appeal, correcting deficiencies in the filing that caused it to be dismissed, or if he had simultaneously corrected the deficiencies and exhausted the claims “up the ladder” in the Supreme Court. He did neither. Unlike Delhomme, and like Biggs and King, Gaston was (at best) starting a new round when he took a new set of eleven claims to Superior Court in January 1999.
Is the law in our circuit now that — if a petitioner has filed anything in any state court before the statute of limitations ran, *1050and after intervals of no more than three or four years between denials, files something else in any state court — AEDPA’s statute of limitations is completely ineffectual? If no California court expressly states that the filings are untimely, perhaps. that is, as of today, circuit law. Treating Gaston’s random walk up and downstairs in the California court system as analogous to an ordinary state appellate process of exhausting one full round of post conviction relief does not square with common sense.

. Chavis v. LeMarque, 382 F.3d 921 (9th Cir.2004), cert. granted, -U.S. -, 125 S.Ct. 1969, 161 L.Ed.2d 855 (2005).

. Id. at 925-26.

. Pace v. DiGuglielmo, - U.S. -, -, 125 S.Ct. 1807, 1812, 161 L.Ed.2d 669 (2005).

. Carey v. Saffold, 536 U.S. 214, 122 S.Ct. 2134, 153 L.Ed.2d 260 (2002).

. Id. at 226, 122 S.Ct. 2134.

. Chavis, 382 F.3d at 926.

. Saffold, 536 U.S. at 222, 122 S.Ct. 2134.

. Id. at 220, 122 S.Ct. 2134 (quoting O’Sullivan v. Boerckel, 526 U.S. 838, 845, 119 S.Ct. 1728, 144 L.Ed.2d 1 (1999)).

.Gaston’s haphazard fillings throughout the California court system are as follows: (1) California Court of Appeal, July 11, 1995 (denied February 27, 1996), (2) California Superior Court, June 9, 1997 (denied June 17, 1997), (3) California Supreme Court, August 11, 1997 (denied April 15, 1998) (4) California Superior Court, January 22, 1999 (denied January 22, 1999), (5) California Court of Appeal, February 8, 1999, (denied April 27, 1999), and (6) California Supreme Court, February 28, 2000 (denied June 2, 2000).

. Biggs v. Duncan, 339 F.3d 1045 (9th Cir.2003).

. King v. Roe, 340 F.3d 821 (9th Cir.2003).

. Delhomme v. Ramirez, 340 F.3d 817 (9th Cir.2003).

. Biggs, 339 F.3d at 1048.

. Id. (quoting Saffold, 536 U.S. at 223, 122 S.Ct. 2134) (emphasis in original).

. King, 340 F.3d at 823.

. Delhomme, 340 F.3d at 819.

. Id. at 820-21.

. Id. at 821.