Martin v. Jones

• Decision Date: 21 July 1997
• Docket Number: No. 2:97-0045.,2:97-0045.
• Citation: 969 F.Supp. 1058
• Parties: John Thomas MARTIN, Petitioner, v. Charles JONES, Warden, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Middle District of Tennessee

969 F.Supp. 1058

John Thomas MARTIN, Petitioner, v. Charles JONES, Warden, Respondent.

No. 2:97-0045.

United States District Court, M.D. Tennessee, Northeastern Division.

July 21, 1997.

John Thomas Martin, SPR-Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, Wartburg, TN, pro se.

Kathy Morante, Office of Attorney General/Criminal Justice Div., Nashville, TN, Elizabeth B. Marney, Office of Attorney General of TN, Criminal Div., Nashville, TN, for Respondent.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

WISEMAN, Senior District Judge.

I. Facts and Procedural History

John Thomas Martin ("Petitioner"), proceeding pro se (albeit with the assistance of an inmate legal aide), has petitioned this Court for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. Petitioner is an inmate at Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility in Wartburg, Tennessee. On July 28, 1989, Petitioner was convicted of murder in the first degree and received a sentence of life imprisonment. Petitioner directly appealed the conviction to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals which affirmed the trial court on January 7, 1992. The Tennessee Supreme Court subsequently denied Petitioner's application for permission to appeal on May 11, 1992. Petitioner filed a pro se petition for post-conviction relief pursuant to T.C.A. § 40-30-101 et seq. on May 11, 1995, and his appointed counsel later filed an amended petition.

Petitioner has not received an evidentiary hearing in state court and has now filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. The petition contains five claims: three that have been exhausted on direct appeal (lack of a speedy trial, improper admission of the death certificate into evidence, and refusal of the trial court to grant a severance) and two that are still pending at the state post-conviction level (ineffective assistance of counsel and conviction absent proof beyond a reasonable doubt).

This Court concluded that it was not readily apparent from the face of the petition that Petitioner was not then entitled to relief, and ordered Charles Jones, Warden of Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility ("Respondent") to respond to the petition in accordance with Rule 5, Rules- § 2254. Respondent has moved for summary judgment on the three exhausted claims and for dismissal on the two unexhausted claims.

II. Procedural Analysis

Petitioner has apparently filed his petition at this time due to the confusion surrounding the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("Act"), Pub.L. No. 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996), that amended several sections of 28 U.S.C., the relevant parts in this instance being §§ 2244 and 2254. Accordingly, threshold procedural issues concerning the statute of limitations and exhaustion requirements must be addressed before proceeding to any discussion of the merits.

A) Statute of Limitations

The Act amends 28 U.S.C. § 2244 by adding a new subsection (d). Section 2244(d) imposes a one-year period of limitations on an application for a writ of habeas corpus by a person in custody pursuant to a state court judgment. The limitation runs from the latest of several periods, the relevant period in this instance being the date on which the judgment became final by the conclusion of direct review. The time during which a properly filed application for state post-conviction collateral review is pending is not counted toward the period of limitations. Previously, no specific statute of limitations provision existed although Rule 9(a) allowed dismissal on the grounds of laches if the state had been prejudiced by the delay of the petition.

Although respondent has not raised the statute of limitations as a grounds for dismissal, the Court raises this question sua sponte because of the importance in addressing and settling the uncertainty surrounding the Act. While the Supreme Court has recently shed light on other subsections of the Act in Lindh v. Murphy, ___ U.S. ___, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997), it did not discuss the retroactivity of the § 2244(d)(1) period of limitations nor its applications to petitions containing multiple claims. Both issues are discussed separately below.

1) Retroactivity

It must be noted that the instant petition was not pending on the date of the Act's effectiveness¹, but rather was filed on April 17, 1997. The retroactivity issue before the Court, then, is not whether the amendments to § 2244 imposed by the Act should apply to a motion pending on the date of the Act's effectiveness, but instead whether these amendments may alter the disposition of a petition premised on the factual and procedural predicate in place before April 24, 1996, yet not formally presented until nearly one year later.

Literal application of the amended statute, as suggested by several district courts², would bar claims 1 through 3 of Mr. Martin's § 2254 petition as of May 11, 1993, nearly three years prior to the Act's effective date.³ As the Tenth Circuit has reasoned, however, application of the law in such a manner would strip prisoners of their rights and expectations without notice or opportunity to act. See United States v. Simmonds, 111 F.3d 737, 745 (10th Cir.1997) (addressing the parallel statute of limitations found in § 2255). In other words, on the eve of the Act's enactment Petitioner could have been confident that he possessed the right to petition this Court for a writ of habeas corpus, only to rise the next morning to earn that his right had not only disappeared, but had expired three years earlier.

The Supreme Court has noted that the "Constitution .... requires that statutes of limitations must `allow a reasonable time before they take effect for the commencement of suits upon existing causes of action.'" Block v. North Dakota, 461 U.S. 273, 286 n 23, 103 S.Ct. 1811, 1819 n. 23, 75 L.Ed.2d 840 (1983) (quoting Texaco, Inc. v. Short, 454 U.S. 516, 527 n. 21, 102 S.Ct. 781, 791 n. 21, 70 L.Ed.2d 738 (1982)). Thus, the party bringing suit must be given a grace period in which he can file suit upon pre-accrued claims free of any bar or prejudice imposed by the new statute. In light of Supreme Court precedent this Court does not accept the view that the amended § 2244(d) applies retroactively.

This raises the question as to what is a "reasonable time" within which Petitioner must file his habeas case. Both the Tenth and Seventh Circuits have ruled that the one-year limitation imposed by the Act was short enough so that the limitation itself was considered a reasonable time. See Simmonds, 111 F.3d at 746; Lindh v. Murphy, 96 F.3d 856, 866 (7th Cir.1996), rev'd on other grounds, ___ U.S. ___, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997). Under this analysis, no petition filed by April 23, 1997, one year from the date of enactment, could be dismissed for violating the statute of limitations. While the Second Circuit has stated that there is no need to apply the full year as the reasonable time standard, they have not provided any other time frame for guidance. See Peterson v. Demskie, 107 F.3d 92, 93 (2nd Cir.1997). This Court sees no reason why it is preferable to make case by case determinations of reasonableness, as suggested by Peterson, in place of a predetermined one-year period. If anything, lack of a set standard can only increase the risk of arbitrary treatment by courts in deciding which petitions are time-barred. Therefore, this Court recognizes April 23, 1997 as the date by which all § 2254 petitions based on final judgments rendered before the Act's enactment must be filed.

Accordingly, Petitioner's exhausted claims, if not tolled by the presence of pending post-conviction remedies (discussed below), would not be barred since the petition was filed on April 17, 1997.

2) Habeas Petitions Containing Multiple Claims

The new statute raises the possibility that a habeas petition may contain multiple claims, each with a different date that would trigger the statute of limitations. While § 2244(d)(2) tolls the statute during the period in which a properly filed post-conviction remedy is pending, the Act does not provide guidance as to whether this tolling pertains only to the pending post-conviction claim, or extends to any other claims previously exhausted on direct appeal. Although the issue has not been widely litigated, those courts that have addressed it have stated that the one year period of limitations does not begin to run until after both direct review and post-conviction review have been exhausted. See Valentine v. Senkowski, 966 F.Supp. 239 (S.D.N.Y.1997); Parisi v. Cooper, 961 F.Supp. 1247 (N.D.Ill.1997).

This Court agrees and construes § 2244(d)(2) to toll the statute of limitations on all pending claims regardless of their finality, an interpretation that would be in keeping with Congress' goal of eliminating piecemeal litigation. See Parisi, 961 F.Supp. at 1248-1249 (stating that the thrust of the 1996 legislation was to streamline the habeas process). If each claim must be filed one year from the later of its final rejection in state court or from the date of the Act's enactment, two possibilities are likely to occur. Prisoners seeking habeas review will file an initial petition for their exhausted claims, and subsequently amend the petition as the pending post-conviction remedies become final. Id. This action would lead to further questions as to whether the added claim is a successive petition subject to § 2244(b)(2).⁴

The likelier scenario is that prisoners, seeking to avoid the risk of having their amended claims deemed successive petitions, will file premature petitions containing both exhausted and unexhausted claims. This is precisely the situation before this Court. Petitioner feared that his three exhausted claims would expire on April 23, 1997, one year from the Act's enactment. Accordingly, he felt the compulsion to file this petition containing all his claims six days before what he perceived to be the deadline. Petitioner's action,...