Harris v. Allen

• Decision Date: 08 February 2010
• Docket Number: Civil Action No. 2:07cv239-MHT.
• Parties: Louise HARRIS, Petitioner, v. Richard ALLEN, Commissioner, Alabama Department of Corrections, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Middle District of Alabama

683 F.Supp.2d 1284

Louise HARRIS, Petitioner, v. Richard ALLEN, Commissioner, Alabama Department of Corrections, Respondent.

Civil Action No. 2:07cv239-MHT.

United States District Court, M.D. Alabama, Northern Division.

February 8, 2010.

Jessica Renee Holloway, New York, NY, Pro Hac Vice.

Stuart Walter Gold, Cravath Swaine & Moore, New York, NY, William Rives Blanchard, Jr., Blanchard Law Offices, Montgomery, AL, for Petitioner.

John McGavock Porter, Office of the Attorney General, Montgomery, AL, for Respondent.

OPINION

MYRON H. THOMPSON, District Judge.

When petitioner Louise Harris filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in this court pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254, she immediately moved to stay and hold in abeyance federal proceedings on that petition. The court granted the motion. Harris's petition is again before the court, this time on a motion to dissolve the stay so that her petition can now be heard on the merits. The court will grant Harris's motion and dissolve the stay, but, for the reasons that follow, will also dismiss her petition without prejudice.

I. BACKGROUND

In 1989, Harris was convicted of capital murder in a state trial court in Montgomery County, Alabama. Following her conviction, she was sentenced to death by the judge who presided over her trial.¹ On direct appeal, her conviction and sentence were affirmed by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, Harris v. State, 632 So.2d 503 (Ala.Crim.App.1992), and the Alabama Supreme Court, Ex parte Harris, 632 So.2d 543 (Ala.1993). The United States Supreme Court "granted certiorari to consider Harris's argument that Alabama's capital sentencing statute is unconstitutional," Harris v. Alabama, 513 U.S. 504, 505, 115 S.Ct. 1031, 130 L.Ed.2d 1004 (1995), but rejected that argument and "affirmed the judgment of the Alabama Supreme Court," id. at 515, 115 S.Ct. 1031.²

Subsequently, pursuant to Ala. R.Crim. P. 32, Harris sought state post-conviction review of her conviction and sentence. Upon review, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Harris's conviction again, but found that her "counsel were ineffective at the penalty phase of the trial," reversed her death sentence, and remanded her "cause ... for a new penalty-phase hearing before a jury." Harris v. State, 947 So.2d 1079, 1132 (Ala.Crim.App. 2004). The Alabama Supreme Court denied the State's petition for certiorari on the issue of Harris's sentence reversal, Pet., Ex. C (Doc. No. 1-4), but, on the same day, granted certiorari to consider several challenges to her conviction, Pet., Ex. D (Doc. No. 1-5). The court affirmed Harris's conviction on May 12, 2006, Ex parte Harris, 947 So.2d 1139 (Ala.2006), and overruled her application for rehearing on July 21, 2006, Pet., Ex. F (Doc. No. 1-7).

Less than a year later, on March 16, 2007, Harris filed a habeas petition in this court, raising constitutional challenges to her conviction. As noted above, her petition was accompanied by a motion for stay and abeyance of federal proceedings. Specifically, she requested that proceedings "be held in abeyance pending her resentencing hearing and a state court resolution of the penalty phase claims that may arise from that proceeding." Mot. for Stay at 2 (Doc. No. 7). After considering her request and receiving no objection from respondent Richard Allen, the court granted the motion.

Although nearly three years have passed since Harris filed her habeas petition in this court, the Alabama trial court has not held, or even scheduled, a re-sentencing hearing. The trial court held a status conference on December 13, 2007, but "decided that it needed to reschedule the conference to have Ms. Harris present (although she had waived her right to be present at the status conference)." Pet'r Memo at 2 (Doc. No. 15). The conference has yet to be rescheduled. Moreover, on October 31, 2008, the district attorney for Montgomery County moved the trial court to "enter an Order to Stay any further proceedings in State Court until the Federal Court has completely ruled on all of the Defendant's pending Writs and Motions." Mot. to Dissolve Stay, Ex. D at 1 (Doc. 13-5). Although the trial court has not granted the requested stay, Harris has notified that court that she "agrees to a stay of the state court proceedings as long as the federal Court proceeds to review her pending federal habeas petition." Mot. to Dissolve Stay at 3 (Doc. No. 13). In keeping with her notice to the state court, Harris filed the instant motion to dissolve the stay of federal proceedings.

II. DISCUSSION

As noted above, Harris initially sought to stay federal review of her conviction-related claims until she had been re-sentenced by the state trial court. The timing of Harris's filing in federal court and her decision to seek a stay pending re-sentencing were driven by then-reasonable concern that provisions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) might otherwise block review of her existing conviction-related claims and any potential sentence-related claims. Harris now contends that,

"In the two years since she filed her Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion for Stay and Abeyance ... decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit have clarified what constitutes a `judgment' for purposes of the procedural requirements of AEDPA, and, thus, what will be considered a `successive' petition under AEDPA. In view of these recent decisions, Mrs. Harris now believes that she will not be prejudiced if she moves forward with her innocence claims in federal court before proceeding with her resentencing in state court."

Mot. to Dissolve Stay at 3 (Doc. No. 13) (internal citations omitted). The court concludes, however, that in "clarifying what constitutes a `judgment' for the purpose of ... AEDPA," these very decisions establish that the court lacks jurisdiction over Harris's petition.

As suggested by the above-quoted excerpt from Harris's motion, the court's analysis of her request requires an examination of the interplay among, and evolving interpretation of, various provisions of AEDPA. In conducting this analysis, the court finds it useful to explain first why Harris finds herself in, as she puts it, "the unusual position of having an involuntarily bifurcated set of habeas claims." Pet'r Memo at 1 (Doc. No. 15).³ The court then explains why the necessary response to this particular "bifurcation" is a dismissal of her petition without prejudice.

Harris's decision to file her petition and motion to stay proceedings was driven by the decision of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Rainey v. Sec'y for the Dep't of Corr., 443 F.3d 1323 (2006). In that case, the appellate court interpreted and applied AEDPA's statute of limitations, which states, in pertinent part, that,

"A 1-year period of limitation shall apply to an application for writ of habeas corpus by a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court. The limitation period shall run from ... the date on which the judgment became final by the conclusion of direct review or the expiration of the time for seeking such review."

28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1)(A). The court held that "when a habeas petitioner who has been resentenced brings an application challenging only his original judgment of conviction, the one-year statute of limitations under the AEDPA runs from the date the original judgment of conviction became final and not the date the resentencing judgment became final." Rainey, 443 F.3d. at 1326.

The Rainey court's interpretation of § 2244(d), when read with other provisions of AEDPA, raised some difficult questions for Harris and similarly situated would-be federal-habeas petitioners. In addition to establishing a statute of limitations, AEDPA requires petitioners to "exhaust the remedies available in the courts of the State" before filing in federal court. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1)(A). Because Harris had exhausted state remedies with respect to her "judgment of conviction," the Rainey decision created the possibility that the statute of limitations would bar un-filed federal challenges to her conviction after one year.⁴ On the other hand, because she had not been re-sentenced, she could not have exhausted, or even identified, any sentence-related claims and thus could not file them in federal court. Harris's circumstances were further complicated by the possibility that a later federal petition challenging only her sentence might be treated as a "second or successive" petition and thus dismissed. See 28 U.S.C. § 2244; see also Rose v. Lundy, 455 U.S. 509, 521, 102 S.Ct. 1198, 71 L.Ed.2d 379 (1982) ("A prisoner who decides to proceed only with his exhausted claims and deliberately sets aside his unexhausted claims risks dismissal of subsequent federal petitions.").⁵

Faced with the questions raised by the Rainey decision, Harris prudently chose to file her habeas petition and seek a stay and abeyance. See Pace v. DiGuglielmo, 544 U.S. 408, 416, 125 S.Ct. 1807, 161 L.Ed.2d 669 (2005) (suggesting that a petitioner facing similar concerns might "file a `protective' petition in federal court and ask the federal court to stay and abey the federal habeas proceedings until state remedies are exhausted"). As stated above, Harris is now confident that subsequent decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals—including the explicit overruling of Rainey—clear the path for this court to address immediately her conviction-related claims without risking a procedural bar to any later sentence-related claims.

Harris relies in particular on Burton v. Stewart, 549 U.S. 147, 127 S.Ct. 793, 166 L.Ed.2d 628 (2007) (per curiam), and Ferreira v. Sec'y, Dep't of Corr., 494 F.3d 1286 (11th Cir.2007). In the former, the Supreme Court explained, as it had previously, that: "`Final judgment in a criminal case means sentence. The sentence is the judgment.'" Burton, 549 U.S. at 156, 127...