Ruiz v. Quarterman

• Citation: 504 F.3d 523
• Decision Date: 11 October 2007
• Docket Number: No. 07-70025.,07-70025.
• Parties: Rolando RUIZ, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Nathaniel QUARTERMAN, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (5th Circuit)

504 F.3d 523

Rolando RUIZ, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Nathaniel QUARTERMAN, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 07-70025.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

October 11, 2007.

Morris H. Moon, Jared Tyler (argued), Tex. Def. Serv., Houston, TX, for Ruiz.

Jeremy Craig Greenwell (argued), Austin, TX, for Quarterman.

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

Before HIGGINBOTHAM, BENAVIDES and DENNIS, Circuit Judges.

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge:

This is a death penalty case from Bexar County, Texas. Petitioner Rolando Ruiz appeals the federal district court's order denying his Rule 60 motion for relief from judgment and stay of execution. Ruiz brings serious charges of incompetent and ineffective trial counsel, but no federal court has considered the merits of his constitutional claims, and he obtained a stay only within minutes of his execution, granted by this court in order to gain sufficient time to consider properly the appeal. After further briefing and oral argument, we continue the stay of execution, reverse the judgment dismissing the federal habeas petition and remand with instruction to the federal district court to decide the claim of ineffective trial counsel on its merits after any further proceedings necessary to do so.

I

Rolando Ruiz was convicted of murder by a Texas jury and sentenced to death. At the state's urging, and over his objections, the state trial court declined to appoint different counsel on direct appeal on the promise that any Sixth Amendment claim of ineffective counsel could be raised by state habeas counsel. It was not. Without meeting his client or conducting any investigation, Ruiz's state habeas counsel filed a boilerplate application in state court that did not challenge the failure of his trial counsel to investigate and present his mitigating evidence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) denied relief.

Ruiz turned to federal court and with a new lawyer filed a federal habeas application raising claims of ineffective assistance by trial counsel and his state habeas counsel. The district court denied relief due to "[t]he inexplicable failure of petitioner's state habeas counsel to raise any of these claims during petitioner's state habeas corpus proceeding." The district court ruled that the claim was procedurally defaulted because "the state court to which he would be required to petition would now find the claims procedurally barred." Although convinced that while Ruiz's state counsel was "wholly incompetent" and "egregiously inept," the district court rejected Ruiz's contention that this inept performance gave legal excuse for the failure to exhaust. It refused to entertain the claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel and refused to issue a certificate of appealability for that claim. The federal district court judge did issue a certificate of appealability upon a claimed error in juror selection. Then, in denying Ruiz's motion to alter judgment, the district court made clear that his ruling rested on his conclusion that "Texas law precludes petitioner from obtaining a ruling on the merits of his currently unexhausted claims . . . in a successive state habeas corpus application." Ruiz's federal counsel asked the federal district court to stay the federal proceeding to allow Ruiz to return to state court to exhaust the ineffective-assistance claim, pointing to the CCA's then-recent abandonment of its refusal to accept a state court habeas application so long as the petitioner had a federal habeas petition pending. In refusing to hold the federal claim in abeyance, the federal district court observed:

[E]ven if this court were to hold this cause in abeyance so as to permit petitioner to fairly present the state habeas court with his unexhausted claim herein for the first time, such an action would be an exercise in futility . . . . Petitioner's reference to the recent recision of the long-standing Texas rule which prohibited simultaneous litigation of a claim in both state and federal habeas corpus proceedings is non sequitur.¹

Armed with the COA on the juror issue, Ruiz appealed to this court, at the same time seeking review of the district court's rejection of legal justification for the failure to exhaust. We affirmed and the Supreme Court denied certiorari.

With the failure to persuade the federal courts that his lack of effective habeas counsel excused his failure to exhaust, and with suggestions by the CCA that a return to state court might no longer be futile, approximately ninety days later Ruiz filed an application for state habeas relief raising his claim of ineffective assistance at trial and in the presentation of his first state habeas application. The CCA dismissed his application with an order on which much now depends, as we will explain. After the CCA's dismissal of his application, Ruiz returned to federal district court, filing a motion under Rule 60(b) for relief from judgment in light of the CCA's ruling, which, Ruiz argued, rejected on the merits his Sixth Amendment claim of ineffective trial counsel and in doing so pulled the ground from under the federal district court's earlier judgment dismissing the claim and refusing to hold the federal claim in abeyance while Ruiz returned to state court with his unexhausted claim. The district court defended its earlier dismissal and denied the motion, rejecting the contention that the CCA's decision had not rested upon an independent and adequate state law ground. As we will explain the latter was an error of law and the former an abuse of discretion.

II

We first address whether Ruiz's Rule 60(b) motion is subject to the additional restrictions that apply to "second or successive" habeas corpus petitions under AEDPA.² We are not persuaded that the motion was a successive petition.

Rule 60(b) allows a losing party to seek relief from judgment under a limited set of circumstances including fraud, mistake, and newly discovered evidence.³ Relief is available under Rule 60(b) in habeas proceedings, but of course only in conformity with AEDPA, including its limits of successive federal petitions.⁴ It is a subsequent habeas corpus application whenever the Rule 60 motion presents a "claim" for habeas relief. The Supreme Court has provided guidance, holding that "[i]f neither the motion itself nor the federal judgment from which it seeks relief substantively addresses federal grounds for setting aside the movant's state conviction, allowing the motion to proceed as denominated creates no inconsistency with the habeas statute or rules."⁵ The Court provided helpful examples, explaining that a Rule 60(b) motion is a habeas claim when it presents a new claim for relief, or when it presents new evidence in support of a claim already litigated,⁶ or when it asserts a change in the substantive law governing the claim, or when it attacks the federal court's previous resolution of a claim on the merits. Significantly, the Court then explained that there is no new habeas claim "when [a petitioner] merely asserts that a previous ruling which precluded a merits determination was in error — for example, a denial for such reasons as failure to exhaust, procedural default, or statute-of-limitations bar."⁷

Such is the case here. The federal district court's previous denial of Ruiz's claim was not "on the merits." That is, the district court did not rule that there were no grounds entitling Ruiz to habeas corpus relief under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2254(a) and (d), but rather denied relief based on procedural default and failure to exhaust, two rulings specifically identified by the Court as rulings precluding a merits determination. So the district court had jurisdiction to consider Ruiz's Rule 60(b) motion, free of the jurisdictional constraints of AEDPA upon successive petitions. In short, Ruiz is pursuing his first federal petition with its claim that his trial counsel was ineffective in failing to investigate and otherwise develop a mitigation case,⁸ a "Wiggins" claim.

III

The federal court below would have had no federal claim before it if, as the district court concluded, the CCA applied an independent and adequate state law ground to deny relief.⁹ Moreover the petition would then have been successive and Rule 60 would not allow Ruiz to escape the successive writ limits of AEDPA.

In deciding whether the CCA refused relief upon an independent state-law ground or upon the merits of Ruiz's petition we are aided by the bright light of Michigan v. Long:

when . . . a state court decision fairly appears to rest primarily on federal law, or to be interwoven with federal law, and when the adequacy and independence of any possible state law ground is not clear from the face of the opinion, we will accept as the most reasonable explanation that the state court decided the case the way it did because it believed that federal law required it to do so.¹⁰

This settled principle gives to state courts control over the federal review of their opinions. It has become a rote rule at the fingertips of every writing member of state courts of last resort — where studied ambiguity or clarity in the decisional footing is an art form and an absence of clarity in an opinion is seldom inadvertent. Calibrated uncertainty can play a mediating role in garnering support for an outcome. To the point, that the CCA did not make clear that its decision rested on an independent state ground opens the merits of Ruiz's Wiggins claim to federal review. At best, the CCA did not make clear whether it relied on state or federal law in dismissing Ruiz's application. As the CCA is keenly aware, its choice of language was made against a background legal standard — which directs the CCA in either granting an application for consideration of subsequent claims or dismissing that application as an abuse of the writ — that...