Court Opinion

ID: 9471620
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:37:04.225037+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:29.927314
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur separately only to adhere to the practice that it is better not to decide what it is not necessary to decide, absent a probability that the same issue will be presented at a later stage of the case.
*1109A district court’s refusal woodenly to follow, in some subsequent case, an order issued by us although it had ceased to make sense or had produced developments which would frustrate justice, should not be doomed to reversal simply because of similarity with certain aspects of the instant case. The district judge’s action may, on that case’s peculiar facts, have been eminently reasonable and well within his discretion, assuming he had any. It might be possible to hold that the matter had been left open explicitly or by implication or some other adequate reason not now readily apparent might emerge as a sufficient ground for upholding the district court’s decision. Rather than foreclose the matter by establishing unnecessary binding authority and needlessly compelling a useless exercise of remand in the name of “formality” or “regularity,” I would prefer here to rest the reversal on the more narrow grounds that, assuming (but not deciding) that there was discretion in the district court to depart from our earlier order, nevertheless here the action amounted to an abuse of discretion.
Sufficient reasons to justify a departure from our earlier order to dismiss under Rose v. Lundy, 455 U.S. 509, 102 S.Ct. 1198, 71 L.Ed.2d 379 (1982) simply are not apparent.1 Hence, in doing so, the district judge, at the very least, abused his discretion.
For reasons in a like vein, I refrain from committing myself to the views expressed in section III of the panel majority opinion. The waiver asserted by the Commonwealth of Virginia does have conditional aspects, in that it was provided only after the Commonwealth knew how the decision on the merits was going to come out. Nevertheless, a ruling on the point is needless in view of the grounds advanced in section II. A waiver approach may not be pressed by the respondent or adopted by the district court, if another habeas corpus, as is probable, is filed by the present petitioner. A death case defendant presumably would prefer to take the time to exhaust in a state proceeding, thereby rendering academic the exhaustion issue. Yet, another case, presenting facts it is not now possible to perceive, may well make a waiver with similar characteristics permissible or even desirable. I would not tie our hands by decision now, when it is not necessary to take decision.

. It is to be doubted that the Supreme Court clearly foresaw that the holding in that case, operating to delay, if not to prevent, a hearing on the merits in a habeas corpus case, would be converted into a haven for a petitioner in a death penalty case, since for such a one delay in and of itself may amount to a partial victory. He may be encouraged purposely to include one unexhausted claim in every habeas corpus petition, and thereby spin things out for quite a while. However, any limitation of the thrust of Rose v. Lundy to accommodate for that twist must come from the Supreme Court, not an intermediate federal court.