In re Paredes
| Decision Date | 25 October 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. 14-51160,14-51160 |
| Parties | In re: MIGUEL A. PAREDES, Movant |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas
Before JOLLY, SMITH, and OWEN, Circuit Judges.
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Miguel Paredes is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, October 28, 2014. On Saturday, October 18, 2014, ten days before his scheduled execution, he filed in the federal district court a "Motion for Relief from Judgment Pursuant to Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Stay of Execution." The federal district court dismissed the Rule 60(b) motion without prejudice for want of jurisdiction and transferred the motion to this court, citing 28 U.S.C. § 1631. The district court simultaneously denied the motion for stay of execution and denied a certificate of appealability (COA) on all claims. Paredes has applied to this court for a COA and in the alternative, has filed a motion for an order authorizing consideration of a second petition forwrit of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2244. He seeks a stay of his execution. We deny the requested relief.
Certain claims asserted in Paredes's Rule 60(b) motion must be construed as successive habeas claims. These claims do not rely on a new rule of constitutional law, made retroactive to cases on collateral review by the Supreme Court, that was previously unavailable, or on facts that could not have been discovered previously through the exercise of due diligence.1 Other of Paredes's contentions in his Rule 60(b) motion are not successive because they assert a defect in the integrity of the federal habeas proceedings.2 However, Paredes has not overcome the limitation within Rule 60(b) that requires a motion to be made within a reasonable time, if not governed by the more specific one-year deadline,3 and the requirement of the Supreme Court's decisions that there must be extraordinary circumstances to justify the reopening of a final judgment.4 To the extent that Paredes asserts that his federal habeas counsel had a conflict of interest because he also served as state habeas counsel, Paredes waited until thirty months after the Supreme Court's decision in Martinez v. Ryan,5 and until seventeen months after the Supreme Court's decision in Trevino v. Thaler,6 to assert the conflict of interest he contends arose as a consequence of those decisions. Paredes's Rule 60(b) motion was not filed within one year after the district court's 2007 final judgment denying habeas relief. In any event, it was not filed within a reasonable time after Martinez and Trevino provided Paredes grounds forasserting that his federal habeas counsel had a conflict of interest that precluded him from raising, for the first time in a federal habeas proceeding, a claim that trial counsel was ineffective in failing to discover or present mitigation evidence during the penalty phase of Paredes's 2001 capital murder trial. Even were Paredes's Rule 60(b) motion timely, the change in the law that the Supreme Court's decisions effectuated in Martinez and Trevino does not constitute extraordinary circumstances.7
Paredes received a death sentence for his participation in the murder of three people. Our court has previously considered an application for habeas relief filed by Paredes.8 We briefly recount some of the facts underlying his conviction that were set forth in our last opinion in this case:
Paredes, John Saenz, and Greg Alvarado, who were all members of the Hermanos Pistoleros Latinos gang, anticipated a confrontation regarding an illegal drug transaction and allegedly armed themselves, lay in wait, then shot and killed rival gang members Adrian Torres, Nelly Bravo, and Shawn Cain inside Saenz's home. The victims were slain within seconds of one another. Paredes was charged with murdering more than one person during the same criminal transaction under the Texas capital murder statute. . . . At trial, a witness testified that Paredes admitted to shooting Bravo, and other witnesses testified that Paredes remained silent when, in Paredes's presence, John Saenz recounted that Paredes had shot both Bravo and Cain. One witness, Eric Saenz, the brother of John Saenz, testified that after John Saenz, in Paredes's presence, had described in some detail how he, John Saenz, shot Torres, how Paredes shot Bravo in the head, and how Paredes then shot Cain, Paredes stated to Eric Saenz that Eric "should have been there, that [Eric] would have had some fun." Medical evidence was consistent with testimony that Paredes was the shooter in the deaths of Bravo and Cain butnot Torres. There was direct evidence that Paredes was in John Saenz's home at the time of the killings and assisted in cleaning blood off the floor and walls of the home and in disposing of the bodies afterwards. There was also strong circumstantial evidence that Paredes was present during the killing of each of the three decedents, and that at a minimum, he aided or attempted to aid Saenz in carrying out the plan to kill these individuals.9
A jury found Paredes guilty of capital murder in October 2001. At the conclusion of the penalty phase of the trial, and in accordance with the jury's answer to the Texas special issues, the state trial court sentenced Paredes to death that same month. On direct appeal, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) affirmed Paredes's conviction and death sentence.10 Paredes did not seek relief from the United States Supreme Court at that time.
Paredes then pursued habeas relief in state court in November of 2003. When relief was denied, he sought habeas relief in federal court. As our prior opinions reflect, we affirmed the district court's denial of habeas relief in Paredes's original federal habeas proceedings.11 The Supreme Court denied Paredes's petition for writ of certiorari in 2011.12 No further proceedings have occurred in state or federal court until October 2014.
In the present proceedings, Paredes contends that his state habeas counsel was ineffective regarding a claim that trial counsel was ineffective in failing to discover and present mitigation evidence during the penalty phase of the trial. Paredes further contends that because his state habeas counsel was also his federal habeas counsel in his original federal habeas proceedings, his federal habeas counsel had a conflict of interest. The motion filed in the federaldistrict court that initiated the present proceedings, and the filings in our court presently under consideration were submitted by new counsel that Paredes retained in 2014.
More specifically, Paredes's October 2014 Rule 60(b) motion for relief from the federal district court's 2007 judgment asserts that although his state habeas counsel, Michael Gross, had included a claim in the state habeas petition that his trial counsel was ineffective in failing to discover and present mitigating evidence during the punishment phase of Paredes's trial, this claim was expressly waived by Paredes, in open court, at the state habeas hearing after Paredes had directed Gross not to pursue it. Paredes now contends that Gross should have been aware of circumstances that would have raised doubt as to Paredes's competency to abandon this aspect of his ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim made in state habeas proceedings and that Gross was therefore ineffective as state habeas counsel. Paredes contended in his Rule 60(b) motion in federal district court that his waiver of this part of his state habeas claim violated Due Process. Paredes further contended in the Rule 60(b) motion that had the federal district court originally appointed, in 2006, someone other than Gross as federal habeas counsel, his federal habeas counsel could have further developed the ineffective assistance of trial counsel claim and argued that Gross's deficiency during the state habeas hearing constituted cause to excuse the fact that the new mitigation evidence and the mitigation claim had not been exhausted in state court. Paredes's Rule 60(b) motion to the district court asserted that alternatively, had the federal district court appointed counsel other than Gross, that counsel could have asked the district court to stay proceedings to allow a return to state court to exhaust the new mitigation evidence claim. Paredes contends that Gross was precluded from making these arguments in the original federal habeas proceeding because a significant conflict of interest exists when an attorney must arguethat his representation at an earlier stage of litigation (in this case, the state habeas proceedings) was ineffective.
The district court construed Paredes's Rule 60(b) motion as asserting eight claims, and the district court denied relief on multiple grounds.13 The district court held that the Rule 60(b) motion was untimely, even assuming that Paredes's express waiver in his state habeas proceeding of the ineffective-assistance-of-trial-counsel claim as to mitigation evidence was not valid.14 The district court reasoned that at least by the time that state habeas counsel filed the state habeas petition in 2003, or during the November 2004 state habeas hearing, Paredes knew that he had an ineffective-assistance-of-trial-counsel claim as to mitigating evidence.15
As to the validity of the waiver that Paredes made in open court at the state habeas hearing, the district court concluded that nothing in the record or in Paredes's October 2014 motion casts legitimate doubt as to Paredes's mental competence or intelligence on the date of the November 2004 state habeas hearing.16 The district court further concluded that during the subsequent ten years before Paredes filed the 2014 motion for relief from judgment, the medical records reflect that Paredes was fully capable of logical, rational thought and suffered no debilitating effects from dysthymic disorder.17 The district court's order sets forth considerable detail regarding Paredes'scondition and the lack of any...
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