Another last-week-of-law-school drawing.

Another drawing from the margin of my 1981 Federal Courts classnotes.



Law people may detect that the topic is habeas corpus -- FvN is Fay v. Noia -- a subject usually placed at the end of the fedcourts course. That placement seems to symbolize habeas as the last hope. The Supreme Court took certiorari in a significant habeas case yesterday, as Lyle Denniston reports over on SCOTUSblog:

The time period prison inmates have to file challenges in federal court to their convictions and sentences might be considerably longer than the one year set by Congress, depending upon how the Supreme Court decides the one case it agreed on Monday to hear, Dodd v. U.S. (docket 04-5286). The case, coming from the 11th Circuit, tests when that one-year deadline starts to run, under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Under AEDPA, Congress set the requirements federal and state prisoners must meet if they want to try to take advantage, through a federal habeas challenge, of a constitutional right that has been newly recognized by the Supreme Court. Among the provisions of AEDPA is a one-year limit on the time such habeas petitions may be filed in federal court. Congress, however, apparently did not speak plainly enough in saying when that period starts to run, because the circuit courts are split on that question. The Supreme Court agreed to rule on the Dodd case to clear up that conflict.

The law specifies that the period runs from the date on which the Supreme Court “initially recognized” a new right. But it goes on to say that the right must have been made “retroactively applicable to cases” that are still pending in post-conviction court proceedings. The question before the Court is whether that second provision is a separate factor in calculating the time period.

In the case of Michael Donald Dodd, who was identified by prosecutors as a leader of a large Jamaican drug gang in New York City called the “Sprangler Posse,” the 11th Circuit ruled that the one-year period starts to run as soon as the Supreme Court has issued a ruling setting up a new right. The time, it said, is not extended until the point at which a court decides to apply the new right to cases still pending – an extension that could run a year or longer after the Supreme Court’s initial decision. The Circuit commented: “It would not be logical for Congress to have enacted a strict one-year limitation and then qualified that time by reference to ambiguous events,” such as a later ruling on making the right retroactive. The clause specifying retroactivity, the Circuit added, “qualifies the right asserted – not the time limit.”

That view, cutting off habeas challenges at an earlier point, is shared by the Second, Fifth and Eighth Circuits, but conflicts with the views of four other circuits – the Third, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth. Those four have ruled that, unless a court has declared that a new decision applies to already pending cases, the filing window has not yet opened. That approach can considerably lengthen the one-year span.