Court Opinion

ID: 9497278
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:47:28.352244+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:05.988255
License: Public Domain

TALLMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I
Today the court holds that the petitioner’s newly-minted and untimely-raised coerced confession claim is saved by the “relation back” doctrine of Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(c)(2) because it “arises from the same transaction' — Ms trial and conviction” as petitioner’s timely-filed Confrontation Clause claim. By defining “conduct, transaction, or occurrence” so broadly that any claim stemming from pre-trial motions, the trial, or sentencing relates back to a timely-filed habeas petition, the court obliterates AEDPA’s one year statute of limitation.
The majority of those circuits to consider the intersection of Rule 15(c) and Congress’ strict statute of limitation have more narrowly interpreted “conduct, transaction, or occurrence” to mean that in order to relate back, “the untimely claim must have arisen from the ‘same set of facts’ as the timely filed claim, not from separate conduct or a separate occurrence in ‘both time and type.’ ” Davenport v. United States, 217 F.3d 1341, 1344 (11th Cir.2000).1 I would follow this better reasoned rule because it pays proper respect to the limitation period established by AEDPA. *619I thus respectfully dissent from Section A of the court’s opinion. I agree with the court that the petitioner’s Confrontation Clause claim fails on the merits.
II
The “relation back” doctrine is not easily applied to habeas corpus petitions. Habe-as corpus litigation is, by definition, a collateral attack on the finality of a criminal judgment following direct appeal or a conscious decision to forgo direct attack. Although we have held that Rule 15 applies to habeas petitions, Anthony v. Cambra, 236 F.3d 568, 576 (9th Cir.2000), we have never considered the limits of how such amendments interact with the limitation period. In doing so, we must keep in mind that by enacting strict time restrictions on the filing of habeas petitions, Congress obviously intended to expedite the processing of collateral attacks. See United States v. Hicks, 283 F.3d 380, 389 (D.C.Cir.2002).
In this case, there have already been several rounds of criminal and civil collateral review at all levels of the California trial and appellate court system, which spanned three years. The petitioner timely filed his original pro se habeas petition in federal court on May 8, 1998, within the limitation period. Although well aware of the facts supporting his coerced confession claim when he filed this original petition, he waited nine months to amend it and add the new claim. Petitioner is certainly entitled to continue testing the validity of his otherwise final state first-degree murder conviction by now proceeding in federal court. But the law requires him to bring all of the claims about which he clearly possesses the facts in a timely-filed habeas petition. See United States v. Pittman, 209 F.3d 314, 318 (4th Cir.2000) (finding that petitioner’s claims in the amended petition “were not overly technical and he could have easily included them in his original [petition]”).
Rejecting this court’s interpretation of “conduct, transaction, or occurrence” as too expansive, our sister circuits have observed:
Yet this holding views “occurrence” at too high a level of generality. The fact that amended claims arise from the same trial and sentencing proceeding as the original motion does not mean that the amended claims relate back for purposes of Rule 15(c). If we were to craft such a rule, it would mean that amendments ... would almost invariably be allowed even after the statute of limitations had expired, because most [habeas] claims arise from a criminal defendant’s underlying conviction and sentence. Such a broad view of “relation back” would undermine the limitations period set by Congress in the AEDPA.
Pittman, 209 F.3d at 318.
The better rule is that enunciated by the Eleventh Circuit in Davenport:
In order to relate back, the untimely claim must have arisen from the “same set of facts” as the timely filed claim, not from separate conduct or a separate occurrence in “both time and type.”
217 F.3d at 1344. The whole point of enacting AEDPA was to eliminate drawn-out and unlimited collateral attacks on criminal judgments. See Hicks, 283 F.3d at 389; Pittman, 209 F.3d at 318. In its zeal to allow this late claim to be addressed on the merits, the court invokes the “relation back” doctrine to swallow AEDPA’s statute of limitation, rendering it a virtual nullity through which an unlimited number of amendments must be liberally permitted so long as the original collat*620eral attack was timely filed.2
Ill
The court glosses over the fact that by applying the “relation back” doctrine in these circumstances, the original petition utterly failed to give fair notice to the State of the petitioner’s new claim. The court relies on Kern Oil & Refining Co. v. Tenneco Oil Co., 840 F.2d 730 (9th Cir.1988), which involved a typical civil action for breach of contract and fraud, for the proposition that notice is irrelevant. However, in Anthony v. Cambra, 236 F.3d 568 (9th Cir.2000), we acknowledged that the notice inquiry is indeed proper in the application of Rule 15(c) to amend habeas petitions. My colleagues unpersuasively distinguish our discussion of Rule 15(c) in Anthony, where we held that a petitioner’s amended petition related back because each of its specific claims had been set forth in the original petition. Id. at 576. Relying on the guiding principle that “the touchstone of Rule 15(c) is notice,” we found that “it is plain that the central policy of Rule 15(c) — ensuring that the non-moving party has sufficient notice of the facts and claims giving rise to the proposed amendment — ha[d] been satisfied.” Id. (distinguishing the results in Duffus and Craycraft because “in those cases, the courts specifically relied on the absence of notice to the state regarding the content of the proposed amendments as grounds for denying the motions”).
Not only is the requirement of fair notice supported by our court’s own precedent, this rationale has also been adopted by our sister circuits. In Craycraft, the Eighth Circuit relied on the lack of sufficient notice to find that an amendment did not relate back:
Craycraft’s original complaint alleged deficiencies of representation distinctly separate from the deficiency alleged in his amendments. Failing to file an appeal is a separate occurrence in both time and type from a failure to pursue a downward departure or failure to object to the type of drugs at issue. We cannot say that his original petition would provide notice of such a different sort of theory. Therefore, the amendment cannot relate back under Rule 15(c) and it must be time barred.
Id. Neither my colleagues nor the Seventh Circuit in Ellzey v. United States, 324 F.3d 521 (7th Cir.2003), which the court embraces, have offered a convincing reason to deviate from “the central policy of Rule 15(c) — ensuring that the non-moving party has sufficient notice of the facts and claims giving rise to the proposed amendment.” Anthony, 236 F.3d at 576.
IV
In this case, the petitioner’s timely-filed claim alleged that his Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses was violated when the court admitted during his 1995 trial a videotaped police interview of one of the State’s witnesses. The petitioner’s untimely claim alleges that the trial court improperly denied a pre-trial motion to *621suppress petitioner’s incriminating statement made to police on October 28, 1993. Here, it simply cannot be said that these claims arise from the same set of facts; rather, they arise from distinctly separate occurrences of both time and type. See Hicks, 283 F.3d at 389 (holding that a claim that the government failed to prove the quantity of drugs at trial did not relate back to a timely-filed claim that the government’s willingness to grant leniency in exchange for testimony tainted the petitioner’s trial).3
V
While an amendment offered to clarify or amplify the facts already alleged in support of a timely claim may relate back, an amendment that introduces a new legal theory based on facts different from those underlying the timely claim may not. See Hicks, 283 F.3d at 388. “These principles are faithful both to the underlying purposes of Rule 15(c) and to the concerns about drawn-out and unlimited collateral attacks on ... criminal judgments evinced by the passage of AEPDA. They ensure that relation back will be allowed only where the original motion provides adequate notice of the [petitioner’s] claims and the proposed amendment would neither change the fundamental nature of those claims nor prejudice the[State’s] defense by requiring it to prepare its case anew.” Id. at 389.
The petitioner’s original habeas petition challenging the introduction of his former co-defendant’s videotaped interview was timely. “His amendments thereto were not.” Craycraft, 167 F.3d at 456. I respectfully dissent from application of the “relation back” doctrine to preserve his amended but time-barred coerced confession claim simply because it relates to his underlying conviction and sentence.

. Accord United States v. Hicks, 283 F.3d 380, 389 (D.C.Cir.2002); United States v. Pittman, 209 F.3d 314, 318 (4th Cir.2000); United States v. Duffus, 174 F.3d 333, 337 (3d Cir.1999); United States v. Craycraft, 167 F.3d 451, 457 (8th Cir.1999).

. The court states that the more narrow interpretation underestimates the incentive for a petitioner to file on time because of the possibility that the district court might rule on the petition before he files an amendment. It is the court that underestimates the amount of time required by our district judges to consider and resolve habeas petitions. This case, pending for four years and three months before entry of final judgment, is a good example. Under the court’s expansive invocation of Rule 15(c), petitioner presumably could have amended his petition any number of times as long as "justice so require[d].” District courts would have difficulty ever bringing habeas cases to a close if the broad rule preferred by my colleagues is allowed to stand.

. See also Davenport, 217 F.3d at 1346 (newly offered claims of ineffective assistance of counsel did not relate back to timely-filed claims of ineffective assistance of counsel because they were raised on different sets of facts); Pittman, 209 F.3d at 317-18 (claims regarding obstruction of justice enhancement and failure of counsel to file an appeal did not relate back to claims that the district court lacked jurisdiction to impose an enhanced sentence and the government failed to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the drags at issue were crack cocaine); Duf-fus, 174 F.3d at 337-38 (claim of ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to move to suppress evidence did not relate back to claim of ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to contend on appeal that evidence was insufficient to support conviction); Craycraft, 167 F.3d at 457 (deficiencies of representation alleged in timely-filed petition were separate from the deficiencies alleged in the untimely amended claims because '‘[flailing to file an appeal is a separate occurrence in both time and type from a failure to pursue a downward departure or failure to object to the type of drugs at issue”).