Tomorrow’s Argument in Evans v. Chavis

On Wednesday the Court will hear oral arguments in Evans v. Chavis, No. 04-721, a case about the statute of limitations period for habeas petitions under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (“AEDPA”). The question presented in this case is whether the Ninth Circuit may presume that a California prisoner timely filed his state habeas petition when the California Supreme Court summarily denied the petition without comment. AEDPA places a one-year statute of limitations on habeas petitions filed in federal court. This limitations period is tolled, however, while the prisoner’s application for state habeas review is “pending.” The Court held in Carey v. Saffold that the time between a lower state court’s decision and the filing of an appeal with a higher state court, known as “interval tolling,” will toll the AEDPA limitations period if the prisoner’s state court petitions were not unreasonably delayed. In other words, for a state habeas petition to be considered pending – and thus not running down the prisoner’s AEDPA clock – there cannot have been any unreasonable delays by the prisoner in filing his successive state habeas appeals.

Catherine Chatman will argue for the petitioner. Peter K. Stris will argue for the respondent. The briefs are available here.

The California Supreme Court often summarily denies habeas petitions without explanation, for reasons of both substance — i.e., failure to state a claim — and procedure, i.e., lack of timeliness. Rather than undertake its own independent analysis of whether there were unreasonable delays in a prisoner’s state habeas applications, the Ninth Circuit presumes that all summarily denied habeas petitions were timely. This presumption of timeliness means that the prisoner’s state habeas petition was pending, thus tolling the AEDPA statute of limitations period until the state court issued its final denial of habeas.

State law determines whether a prisoner’s state habeas filings were timely. California, unlike 48 other states, does not set a fixed deadline by which a prisoner must file a habeas petition; rather, the prisoner must file his petition “without substantial delay.” If there is substantial delay, the prisoner must demonstrate good cause for the delay. California is also different from other states in that each level of state court has original jurisdiction to hear habeas petitions. The preferred procedure is for prisoners to file up the ladder, beginning with the superior court. When one court denies a petition, the prisoner must file a new original petition – rather than an appeal – with a higher state court.

Respondent Reginald Chavis was convicted of attempted murder and mayhem in 1991 and was sentenced to a life term with the possibility of parole. After an unsuccessful appeal and petition for review with the California Supreme Court, Chavis filed a habeas petition in Sacramento Superior Court, which denied his petition on July 30, 1993. Chavis then filed a habeas petition in the California Court of Appeal on August 22, 1994, which the court summarily denied on September 29, 1994.

Up to this point, both sides appear to agree that Chavis’s petitions were timely. The dispute is over his next petition for habeas, which was not filed with the California Supreme Court until November 10, 1997, more than three years after the state court of appeals denied his petition. As petitioner notes, this new petition presented the same claims as the previous petitions, plus one new subclaim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel. On April 29, 1998, the California Supreme Court summarily denied this petition in a “postcard” denial — an order stating only that the “[p]etition for writ of habeas corpus is denied” and lacking any findings as to the petition’s timeliness. It is this three-year delay that was challenged when (after having spent two years filing a second round of state habeas petitions, which are not at issue here) Chavis filed his habeas petition in federal district court on August 30, 2000. The warden filed a motion to dismiss the petition as time-barred by AEDPA’s one-year statute of limitations; the district court agreed and dismissed Chavis’s case. Relying on its presumption that habeas petitions are timely if the state court fails to indicate otherwise, the Ninth Circuit deemed Chavis’s petition to be pending for AEDPA purposes during the three-year delay and thus reversed and remanded.

Under the laws of most states, the three-year delay between the appellate court’s denial and Chavis’s filing with the state supreme court would undoubtedly be considered untimely, such that the one-year federal limitations period would not be tolled for a prisoner in Chavis’s position. Under California law, however, even a “substantial” delay could be overcome by a showing of good cause; thus, Chavis explains that his state supreme court petition was delayed because his prison duties and a prolonged prison-wide lockdown precluded him from accessing the prison library, despite his attempt to gain access through the prison’s internal grievance procedures. Petitioner counters, however, that Chavis’s efforts to access the law library did not in any event begin until more than a year after the state appellate court denied his petition.

Petitioner argues that the Ninth Circuit’s presumption of timeliness conflicts with the Court’s decision in Saffold, which stands for the idea that a state court’s denial of a habeas petition on the merits does not establish the timeliness of the petition, and that federal courts must instead make an independent determination of whether the habeas filings were timely under state law. Petitioner argues that summary denial by a California court has no relation to timeliness, that it is simply more efficient for the state courts to deny petitions on substantive grounds, that occasional explanations of denials do not mean that postcard denials are timely, that the Ninth Circuit presumption will not reach the correct result in many cases, and that the Ninth Circuit derived its presumption from a different context (whether claims were procedurally defaulted). Petitioner also points out that the Fourth Circuit takes a realistic approach to similarly ambiguous denials by North Carolina courts, holding in Allen v. Mitchell that the federal courts must make an independent timeliness determination.

In sum, petitioner argues that by relying on the state court’s postcard denial as an indication that there was no unreasonable delay, the Ninth Circuit likely allows many untimely habeas petitions to be considered on the merits, thereby subverting one of the primary goals of AEDPA: the finality of state court judgments. If California courts want to protect the finality of their judgments, the argument goes, they will be forced to rule on the timeliness of habeas petitions, a burden that state courts should not have to assume simply to make the lives of federal judges easier. Rather, the state suggests, federal courts must make this determination with the help of the California Attorney General, who will share the burden by directing the attention of the federal court to the relevant dates and documents.

After devoting substantial space to explaining petitioner’s argument, respondent argues that Saffold is not controlling because it dealt with a state court denial that was ambiguous on its face: it indicated that the habeas petition at issue in that case was denied, in part, for “lack of diligence” and thus could have indicated a lack of timely filing. In contrast, the state supreme court’s summary denial of Chavis’s petition was manifestly silent on the issue of timeliness. Respondent relies on the Court’s recent decision in Gonzalez v. Crosby – in which, inter alia, whether a state habeas petition was timely and thus properly filed was at issue – for the proposition that a federal inquiry into timeliness is inappropriate when a state court has been silent on the issue. According to respondent, and as explained in greater detail by amicus The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the Ninth Circuit’s presumption promotes federalism and comity by keeping federal courts out of the business of applying state law when state courts decided it was inappropriate to do so. Instead, pointing to the Court’s decision in Harris v. Reed, respondent argues that state courts should expressly state whether a petition was timely if they want to preclude federal review.

Respondent also argues that petitioner’s proposal will further burden the courts by encouraging prisoners to file in federal court before exhausting their state court remedies, just to be safe. As a practical matter, respondent suggests that the Ninth Circuit’s rule will achieve different results only when petitioner has a valid constitutional claim, because all other petitions will be dismissed either for failure to state a prima facie case or for unreasonable delay. Respondent acknowledges that some of these cases might have been untimely filed in the state courts, but finds such error justifiable because in these cases the prisoner will have asserted an actual violation of his rights.

Lurking in the background of this case is perhaps the real question of which court system, if any, must bear the burden of determining whether a prisoner’s state habeas petition was timely filed. As is readily apparent from the briefs, neither the state nor federal courts are anxious to undertake this determination. As the Court recognized in Saffold, “[t]he fact that California’s timeliness standard is general rather than precise may make it more difficult for federal courts to determine” when a habeas petition was unreasonably delayed. As a result of this difficulty, both state and federal courts have found it more efficient to dismiss habeas petitions on the merits. Under AEDPA, though, someone must decide whether the statute of limitations has run out when prisoners such as Chavis file their petitions in federal court years after their sentencing. This Court is unlikely to overlook that requirement.