Court Opinion

ID: 9413442
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-01 23:07:09.504882+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:45:01.832893
License: Public Domain

WIENER, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the foregoing opinion and in the result. I write separately only to add that I do not think we have gone far enough in this instance. Plaintiff-Appellant Morrow has been on death row in Texas for some eleven years. He is certainly in the zone of immediate jeopardy of a death warrant which, when issued, starts a 30-day countdown to execution — a countdown that can only be interrupted by the grant of an extraordinary writ or order from a state or federal court. The process for obtaining such relief begins and usually ends with a petition for writ of habeas corpus. Under such current jurisprudence as McCleskey v. Zant,9 the first such petition had best contain all claims and theories lest subsequent attempts should be met with objections of abuse of the writ. Given Morrow’s Damocle-an position from the time he has been on death row, I believe this court should state, in addition to all else that is stated in the majority opinion, that Morrow has presented facts constituting exceptional circumstances and urgency requiring expedited handling of his FOIA request, entitling him to have his request “go to the head of the line” in the cognizant section of the FBI for handling.

. 499 U.S. 467, 111 S.Ct. 1454, 113 L.Ed.2d 517 (1991).