Felix v. Mayle

• Decision Date: 09 August 2004
• Docket Number: No. 02-16614.,02-16614.
• Citation: 379 F.3d 612
• Parties: Jacoby Lee FELIX, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Deneice A. MAYLE, Warden, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

379 F.3d 612

Jacoby Lee FELIX, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Deneice A. MAYLE, Warden, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 02-16614.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted November 4, 2003.

Submission Withdrawn April 13, 2004.

Resubmitted July 8, 2004.

Filed August 9, 2004.

David M. Porter, Assistant Federal Defender, Sacramento, CA, for the petitioner-appellant.

Mathew Chan, Deputy Attorney General, Sacramento, CA, for the respondent-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California William B. Shubb, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-98-00828-WBS.

Before: CANBY, JR., W. FLETCHER, and TALLMAN, Circuit Judges.

CANBY, Circuit Judge:

This case, in which state prisoner Jacoby Lee Felix seeks a federal writ of habeas corpus to overturn his state conviction, presents an important question of federal civil procedure that has divided other circuits. The question is this: when a habeas petitioner challenging a state conviction amends his federal petition to include a new claim, does the amendment relate back to the date of filing of his petition and thus avoid the one-year limitation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act ("AEDPA"), 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1)? That question in turn depends upon the interpretation of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(c)(2), which provides that an amendment relates back to the date of the original pleading when "the claim or defense asserted in the amended pleading arose out of the conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth ... in the original pleading." We join the Seventh Circuit in concluding that a prisoner's new claim arises out of the same transaction or occurrence as his original petition because the transaction or occurrence in issue is his state trial and conviction. See Ellzey v. United States, 324 F.3d 521 (7th Cir.2003).¹ The claim thus relates back under Rule 15(c)(2). We accordingly reverse the ruling of the district court holding Felix's claim of coerced confession to be time-barred.

Felix also argues that the district court erred in dismissing his Confrontation Clause claim on the merits. We find no error, and we accordingly affirm the district court's dismissal of the Confrontation Clause claim.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

In 1995, Felix was convicted of first degree murder and second degree robbery in California state court. On appeal to the California Court of Appeal, he argued that the admission into evidence of videotaped statements of a key prosecution witness violated his Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him. The Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment. The California Supreme Court subsequently denied Felix's Petition for Review and his state conviction became final on August 12, 1997.

On May 8, 1998, Felix filed in federal district court a pro se petition for writ of habeas corpus raising the same arguments that were raised in his state appeal. AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations for habeas relief expired on August 11, 1998. On January 28, 1999, Felix filed, through counsel, an amended petition that included the Confrontation Clause claim asserted in the original petition and an additional claim, which alleged that the state court violated his right to due process and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by admitting into evidence allegedly involuntary statements that Felix had made during a police interview. The district court accepted the recommended finding of the magistrate judge that the coerced confession claim did not relate back under Rule 15(c)(2) because it did not arise from the "same core of facts" as the Confrontation Clause claim. The court accordingly held the coerced confession claim to be time-barred by AEDPA's one-year limitation.

Felix filed a timely notice of appeal and the district court issued a certificate of appealability for the coerced confession and Confrontation Clause claims. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2253 and we review the district court's decision de novo. See Clark v. Murphy, 331 F.3d 1062, 1067(9th Cir.2003).

DISCUSSION

A

Rule 15(c) applies to federal habeas corpus cases. See Anthony v. Cambra, 236 F.3d 568, 576 (9th Cir.2000). That Rule provides, among other things:

[a]n amendment of a pleading relates back to the date of the original pleading when ... the claim or defense in the amended pleading arose out of the conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth or attempted to be set forth in the original pleading.

Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(c)(2). In other civil litigation, we have required relation-back of new claims arising from the same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" as the claim in the original complaint, even when the new claims are based on a different legal theory of which there was no warning in the original pleading. See Kern Oil & Ref. Co. v. Tenneco Oil Co., 840 F.2d 730, 736 (9th Cir.1988). We fail to see why this literal application of Rule 15(c) should not apply to habeas corpus proceedings.

The Confrontation Clause claim asserted by Felix in his original federal petition arose from the trial that ended with his conviction in state court. His coerced confession claim arises from the same transaction — his trial and conviction in state court. Both claims assert that the conviction was tainted by unconstitutional evidence introduced at his trial. The fact that the claims differ does not mean that they arise from different occurrences. It unduly strains the usual meaning of "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" to regard a criminal trial and conviction as a series of perhaps hundreds of individual occurrences. The Seventh Circuit explained that in such an approach:

[e]ach step of the trial, and each legal argument, becomes a separate transaction or occurrence. Yet this is not how the phrase "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" is used in civil practice. That phrase sums up the "same transaction" approach to the law of preclusion (and thus to compulsory joinder): all legal issues and claims for relief arising out of a single transaction may (and often must) be raised together, and Rule 15(c) specifies that anything that would be barred, if not brought now, may be added and litigated.

Ellzey, 324 F.3d at 526. We agree with Ellzey that the proper "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" in a habeas context is the trial and conviction under attack.

The language of Rule 15(c)(2) supports our conclusion. It provides for the relation back of a "claim" added by amendment if the new claim arises from the same conduct, transaction or occurrence set forth in the original pleading. A new "claim" will nearly always rest on a legal theory, and often on a subset of facts within the larger transaction or occurrence, that differs from those underlying the claim asserted by the original pleading. That is the reason that an amendment becomes necessary. But if such differences are sufficient to prevent relation back under Rule 15(c)(2), that provision of the Rule will be rendered virtually meaningless in the habeas context.

We accordingly disagree, respectfully, with the decisions of several circuits that deny relation back under Rule 15(c)(2) when a new claim rests on a theory or facts within a trial not raised in the original habeas petition. See United States v. Hicks, 283 F.3d 380, 388 (D.C.Cir.2002); Davenport v. United States, 217 F.3d 1341, 1344-45 (11th Cir.2000); United States v. Pittman, 209 F.3d 314, 317-18(4th Cir.2000); United States v. Duffus, 174 F.3d 333, 337-38 (3rd Cir.1999); United States v. Craycraft, 167 F.3d 451, 457 (8th Cir.1999). We distinguished these cases in Anthony, 236 F.3d at 577, but neither endorsed nor rejected their rule because we found it unnecessary to "determine here the full scope of [Rule 15(c)(2)'s] application to amendments of habeas petitions." Id. at 576. Today we cannot distinguish these cases, and so we reject their rule in favor of that of Ellzey.

One of the concerns expressed in some of these cases and in the dissent here is that interpreting "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" in the usual, less restrictive manner would erode the effectiveness of AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations. See, e.g., Hicks, 283 F.3d at 388. AEDPA, however, still requires the original petition to be filed within the one-year period (with exceptions not relevant here). Giving effect to Rule 15(c)(2) does not, therefore, nullify AEDPA's one-year period.² On the other hand, precluding relation back of new claims effectively nullifies Rule 15(c)(2) in habeas proceedings. We decline to read Rule 15(c)(2) in a way that contravenes the ordinary meaning of its language and renders it meaningless in the habeas context. As the Seventh Circuit pointed out, abuses of Rule 15 can be controlled by the district court under subsection (a), which requires leave of court to file an amendment after a responsive pleading has been filed.³ See Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(a); Ellzey, 324 F.3d at 527.

The State argues here that, even if the usual definition is given to the term, Felix's two claims do not arise from the same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" within the meaning of Rule 15(c)(2). The State argues that the coerced confession claim arises out of an interrogation of Felix conducted by police on October 28, 1993, while the Confrontation Clause claim is based on statements voluntarily made by a witness more than three months later. This argument, however, ignores the nature of Felix's habeas challenge. Felix is not bringing a civil action to recover damages for the alleged coercion exerted by police at the time they secured his confession, and he certainly asserts no claim based on the voluntary statement made by another person at another time. He is challenging the usual subject of a habeas petition-the custody that results from his conviction and trial. His coerced confession claim and Confrontation Clause claim assert that the Constitution was violated by the introduction of his confession...