U.S. v. Flores

• Decision Date: 05 March 1998
• Docket Number: No. 96-41188,96-41188
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Romeo Trinidad FLORES, Jr., Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 1000

135 F.3d 1000

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Romeo Trinidad FLORES, Jr., Defendant-Appellant.

No. 96-41188.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

March 5, 1998.

Rehearing Denied May 27, 1998.

Jeffery Alan Babcock, Paula Camille Offenhauser, Asst. U.S. Atty., Houston, TX, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Romeo Trinidad Flores, Jr., Texarkana, TX, pro se.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Before GARWOOD, DUHE and DeMOSS, Circuit Judges.

GARWOOD, Circuit Judge:

Defendant-appellant Romeo Trinidad Flores, Jr. (Flores) appeals the district court's denial of his motion to vacate his sentence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. We affirm.

Facts and Proceedings Below

On August 29, 1991, Flores was convicted following a jury trial of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute in excess of 1,000 kilograms of marihuana in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 846, 841(a)(1), and 841(b)(1)(A). ¹ On direct appeal, this Court reversed Flores' conviction due to the erroneous admission of his codefendant's grand jury testimony. United States v. Flores, 985 F.2d 770 (5th Cir.1993). In his second jury trial, Flores was again convicted. In an opinion dated November 3, 1994, we affirmed the second conviction. United States v. Flores, 40 F.3d 385 (5th Cir.1994) (unpublished table decision).

On April 24, 1996, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (hereinafter "AEDPA" or "Act") was signed into law. ² Most pertinent to Flores, section 105 of the Act amended 28 U.S.C. § 2255 to include a one-year period of limitations. ³ Approximately four months after the enactment of the AEDPA, Flores filed a pro se motion to vacate his sentence pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2255, asserting numerous errors including ineffective assistance of counsel, outrageous government misconduct, violation of the Jenks Act, a Brady violation, and error in the jury instructions. ⁴

In response, the government filed a motion to dismiss, or in the alternative, for summary judgment, arguing both that Flores' motion was procedurally barred by the one-year period of limitation contained in section 2255 as amended by AEDPA (but there acknowledging that a Department of Justice "policy letter" construed the Act's limitations period to commence to run on its effective date) and that the allegations in Flores' motion were fatally conclusory and lacked any evidentiary support. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the government, finding Flores' contentions to be "entirely conjectural and unsupported by anything in the record." Flores filed a timely notice of appeal, and a certificate of appealability (COA) was granted to permit Flores' appeal to this Court. ⁵

Discussion

The district court did not address the limitations question, denying the motion on other grounds. However, because we may affirm on any grounds that were urged below, we address as a threshold issue whether Flores' motion is time barred under the limitations period of the amended section 2255.

The applicability of the limitations provision to motions filed after the enactment of the AEDPA but attacking convictions which became final prior thereto is a question of first impression in this Circuit. ⁶ Those of our sister circuits that have considered the issue ⁷ have all held that such petitioners must be accorded a reasonable time after the enactment of the AEDPA within which to pursue collateral relief. ⁸ Perhaps the seminal case that came to this conclusion was Lindh v. Murphy, 96 F.3d 856 (7th Cir.1996), which determined that prisoners' reliance interests dictated that no collateral attack filed within one year of the AEDPA's enactment would be dismissed as time barred under the AEDPA limitation periods. Id. at 866. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Lindh and reversed on a separate issue. ⁹ Lindh v. Murphy, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997). Although the Court did not specifically address the limitation provisions, or the Seventh Circuit's interpretation of it in Lindh, it did clarify the appropriate construction and temporal application of Title I of the Act, which contains these provisions. Thus, although Lindh does not provide an answer to the question before us, it does help to define the appropriate inquiry.

It is axiomatic that the touchstone of statutory construction is legislative intent. Unfortunately, as is often the case, Congress's intent as to the appropriate temporal application of the limitation provisions is neither apparent on the face of the statute nor otherwise unambiguously expressed. As the Supreme Court noted in Lindh, the AEDPA is unclear in a number of important respects, including the temporal reach of several provisions. ¹⁰ In resolving the ambiguity as to the temporal reach of the AEDPA habeas amendments in general, the Court stated that "[i]n determining whether a statute's terms would produce a retroactive effect, ... and in determining a statute's temporal reach generally, our normal rules of construction apply." Lindh, --- U.S. at ----, 117 S.Ct. at 2063.

We have interpreted Lindh as articulating a generally-applicable "analysis governing the temporal reach of newly enacted legislation." Williams v. Cain, 117 F.3d 863, 864 (5th Cir.1997). As the Supreme Court stated in Lindh, and we reiterated in Williams, "[i]n the absence of a plain statement of the legislature's intent that a statute be applied retroactively, a court must ask whether normal rules of statutory construction suggest that a new provision applies to the case before it." Williams, 117 F.3d at 864 (citing Lindh, --- U.S. at ---- - ----, 117 S.Ct. at 2063-64). Thus, we apply the traditional rules of statutory construction to the provision before us in determining its temporal reach.

In applying legislatively amended periods of limitation, we have typically construed them as "govern[ing] the secondary conduct of filing suit, not the primary conduct of the [parties]." ¹¹ As a consequence, we normally apply the statute of limitation that was in effect at the time of the filing of the suit. We recently took this approach in St. Louis v. Texas Worker's Compensation Commission, 65 F.3d 43 (5th Cir.1995). In St. Louis, we considered the issue of whether application of a limitations period that was enacted prior to the filing of suit but subsequent to the conduct giving rise to the suit was appropriate and permissible. Id. at 45-47. We held that the shorter, amended limitations period governed and, consequently, that the action was time barred. Id. at 48. We reasoned that there was no inequity in applying the new limitations period because the plaintiff had specific notice of the amended period. Id. at 44. And although the time within which the plaintiff had to file was significantly reduced, ¹² the shortened period still allowed the plaintiff reasonable time within which to pursue his claim in court. ¹³

Although our general rule, as stated in St. Louis, is to apply an amended period of limitations to all suits filed after the effective date of amendment, such application is subject to at least one restriction. This constraint was expressed by the Supreme Court in Wilson v. Iseminger, 185 U.S. 55, 60-63, 22 S.Ct. 573, 575, 46 L.Ed. 804 (1902), where the Court stated:

"It may be properly conceded that all statutes of limitation must proceed on the idea that the party has full opportunity afforded him to try his right in the courts. A statute could not bar the existing rights of claimants without affording this opportunity; if it should attempt to do so, it would not be a statute of limitations, but an unlawful attempt to extinguish rights arbitrarily, whatever might be the purport of its provisions."

The Court went on to state that "[i]t is essential that such statutes allow a reasonable time after they take effect for the commencement of suits upon existing causes of action." Id. at 60-63, 22 S.Ct. at 575.

If literally and mechanically applied, the statutory provision here in question would have precisely this prohibited effect: any prisoner whose judgment of conviction had become final more than one year prior to the enactment of the AEDPA would have been barred from seeking collateral relief as of the moment the Act was signed into law. ¹⁴ Accordingly, such a construction would run afoul of the "essential" principle requiring that a "reasonable time" be allowed before the courthouse doors are thus retroactively shut upon a claim. ¹⁵ In the absence of any indication that Congress intended the limitations period to apply in such a harsh manner, ¹⁶ we join the majority of circuits in holding that prisoners must be accorded a reasonable time after the AEDPA's effective date within which to file petitions for collateral relief under section 2255. ¹⁷

We next turn to the question of what constitutes a "reasonable time" in this context. The majority of circuits that have addressed this question have adopted the bright-line rule that one year, running from the effective date of the AEDPA, constitutes a reasonable time. The Second Circuit, in contrast, has adopted an ad hoc approach to determining whether a particular petitioner filed within a reasonable time. ¹⁸ In determining what amount of time should be deemed "reasonable" under the law of this Circuit, we apply--in the particular circumstance of the AEDPA's one-year limitation period--a rule of statutory construction that has been proposed for the resolution of such an issue. One of the earliest discussions of this rule is found in the case of Culbreth v. Downing, 121 N.C. 205, 28 S.E. 294 (1897), where the court determined that an amended statute of limitations did not provide claimants a reasonable time within which to protect their rights, and consequently was faced with the same question that we must now resolve. In Culbreth, the court reasoned that an ad hoc approach was not appropriate, stating that:

"This rule leaves open the...