Rouse v. Lee

• Citation: 314 F.3d 698
• Decision Date: 07 January 2003
• Docket Number: No. 01-12.,01-12.
• Parties: Kenneth Bernard ROUSE, Petitioner-Appellant, v. R.C. LEE, Warden, Central Prison, Raleigh, North Carolina, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 698

314 F.3d 698

Kenneth Bernard ROUSE, Petitioner-Appellant, v. R.C. LEE, Warden, Central Prison, Raleigh, North Carolina, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 01-12.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued September 24, 2002.

Decided January 7, 2003.

ARGUED: Milton Gordon Widenhouse, Jr., Rudolf, Maher, Widenhouse & Fialko, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for Appellant. Clarence Joe DelForge, III, Assistant Attorney General, North Carolina Department of Justice, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Robert M. Hurley, Center for Death Penalty Litigation, Durham, North Carolina, for Appellant. Roy Cooper, Attorney General, William N. Farrell, Jr., Senior Deputy Attorney General, North Carolina Department of Justice, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee.

Before WILLIAMS, MOTZ, and KING, Circuit Judges.

Vacated and remanded by published opinion. Judge DIANA GRIBBON MOTZ wrote the opinion, in which Judge KING joined. Judge WILLIAMS wrote a dissenting opinion.

OPINION

DIANA GRIBBON MOTZ, Circuit Judge.

In this federal habeas petition, his first, Kenneth Bernard Rouse seeks relief on the ground, inter alia, that a juror who voted to convict and execute him deliberately concealed bias in order to win a seat on the jury. The district court held that Rouse's former lawyers filed this petition one day late and that Rouse presented no grounds for equitably tolling the applicable statute of limitations. Accordingly, the court dismissed Rouse's petition as untimely, denying him all federal habeas relief. Rouse appeals, challenging the determination that his petition was not timely filed and the refusal of equitable tolling. Although we agree that Rouse filed his petition one day late, given the exceptional circumstances in this case, we believe that the district court erred in refusing to toll the limitations period. Accordingly, for the reasons set forth within, we grant a certificate of appealability, vacate the judgment of the district court, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I.

At the outset, we emphasize the extremely early stage and sparse record of this case as it reaches us. The district court denied Rouse's petition as untimely on the basis of a record that did not even include the decision of the state post-conviction court, the dispositive decision for federal habeas review. We do not suggest any irregularity in this omission. The habeas rules only require the government to submit the state post-conviction court's decision at a later stage of the litigation. See Fed. R. Governing Section 2254 Cases 2, 5. Nevertheless, the record presented to the district court was sparse indeed.

That limited record reveals that a North Carolina jury convicted Rouse, an African-American, of the brutal first degree murder, armed robbery, and attempted rape of a sixty-three-year-old white woman, Hazel Colleen Broadway. The same all-white jury then sentenced Rouse to death. On direct appeal, the Supreme Court of North Carolina affirmed Rouse's conviction and sentence. See State v. Rouse, 339 N.C. 59, 451 S.E.2d 543 (1994).

The record further reveals that, at some time after sentencing, Rouse discovered new evidence that the mother of one member of the jury that decided his fate had been sexually assaulted and murdered, also in connection with a robbery, by a man who was later executed for her murder.¹ When all prospective jurors were asked for such information at voir dire, the victim's son had remained silent.

After serving on Rouse's jury, this juror allegedly stated that he had intentionally concealed his mother's tragic death and carefully crafted his other responses to voir dire questions, because he wanted to be on the jury that judged Rouse. Moreover, this juror assertedly expressed intense racial prejudice against African-Americans, calling them "niggers" and opining that African-Americans care less about life than white people do, and that African-American men rape white women in order to brag to their friends. Because the juror did not reveal his own family's tragedy or his apparent deep-seated racial prejudice, Rouse had no opportunity to object to the juror or challenge his ability to judge and sentence Rouse impartially.

Rouse collaterally attacked the state court judgment, citing this juror bias, inter alia, by timely filing a motion for appropriate relief in state court. Without a hearing, the state court denied post-conviction relief, but the Supreme Court of North Carolina granted certiorari and remanded the case for reconsideration. See State v. Rouse, 348 N.C. 508, 510 S.E.2d 669 (N.C. 1998). The state post-conviction court again denied relief without holding a hearing, and the Supreme Court of North Carolina denied Rouse's second petition for certiorari on February 5, 1999.² Rouse did not seek rehearing of this second denial in the state supreme court.

On February 8, 2000, Rouse filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the district court, pursuing a number of claims. In particular, he contended that the juror's racial bias and personal prejudice based on his family history had denied Rouse his right to a fair and impartial jury under the Sixth Amendment.

The State moved to dismiss the petition as untimely, under the one-year statutory deadline set forth in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). See 28 U.S.C.A. § 2244(d) (West Supp. 2002). Reviewing the motion, a magistrate judge noted that because AEDPA's deadline fell on Saturday, February 5, 2000, see id. § 2244(d), Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(a) extended the deadline to the next working day, Monday, February 7, 2000. See Hernandez v. Caldwell, 225 F.3d 435, 439 (4th Cir.2000). The magistrate judge therefore concluded that the petition filed on Tuesday, February 8 was late — but only one day late. The magistrate judge nevertheless rejected Rouse's equitable tolling arguments, and recommended that the district court grant the State's motion to dismiss. The district court accepted the recommendation, dismissed the petition, and denied a certificate of appealability.

II.

The Supreme Court has directed that when, as here, a district court "denies a habeas petition on procedural grounds without reaching the prisoner's underlying constitutional claim, a COA [certificate of appealability] should issue when the prisoner shows, at least, that jurists of reason would find it debatable whether the petition states a valid claim of the denial of a constitutional right and that jurists of reason would find it debatable whether the district court was correct in its procedural ruling." Slack v. McDaniel, 529 U.S. 473, 484, 120 S.Ct. 1595, 146 L.Ed.2d 542 (2000). Thus, "[d]etermining whether a COA should issue where the petition was dismissed on procedural grounds has two components, one directed at the underlying constitutional claims and one directed at the district court's procedural holding;" each is part of a "threshold inquiry." Id. at 484-85, 120 S.Ct. 1595.

Rouse, like the petitioner in Slack, "did not attempt to make a substantial showing of the denial of a constitutional right, instead arguing only that the District Court's procedural rulings were wrong." Id. at 485, 120 S.Ct. 1595. In Slack, moreover, because the constitutional claim "was neither briefed nor presented below," the Supreme Court confined its inquiry to the "second component" of the COA analysis, i.e. "whether jurists of reason could conclude that the District Court's dismissal on procedural grounds was debatable or incorrect." Id. Given the responsibilities that immediate appellate courts shoulder under the COA framework, however, it seems prudent to follow the approach of our sister circuits and take a "quick look" at Rouse's constitutional claims to determine if any of these claims "facially allege the `denial of a constitutional right'." Jefferson v. Welborn, 222 F.3d 286, 289 (7th Cir.2000); see also Mateo v. United States, 310 F.3d 39, 41 (1st Cir.2002); Valerio v. Crawford, 306 F.3d 742, 767 (9th Cir.2002) (en banc). If we could conclude that all of his underlying constitutional claims were "utterly without merit, we could affirm the dismissal on that alternative ground." Jefferson, 222 F.3d at 289. Thus, the "quick look" approach "reflects the same impulse as Slack to protect nascent constitutional claims" yet quickly dismiss all habeas petitions that clearly do not meet the COA standard. Mateo, 310 F.3d at 41.

Applying a "quick look" to the limited record before us reveals that at least one of Rouse's claims — the allegations of juror bias — facially alleges the denial of a constitutional right. For this reason, at the very least, "jurists of reason would find it debatable whether the petition states a valid claim of the denial of a constitutional right," Slack, 529 U.S. at 484, 120 S.Ct. 1595, and so we cannot deny a COA on the ground that Rouse has failed to state a valid constitutional claim. Accordingly, we turn our attention to the second threshold inquiry: whether the district court "was correct in its procedural ruling." Id.

Rouse contends that both the district court's holding that his habeas petition was not timely and the court's refusal to toll the statute of limitations were incorrect. We consider each of these contentions in turn.

III.

According to Rouse, the district court committed two separate legal errors in ruling that he filed his petition late.

A.

Initially, Rouse maintains that, although the Supreme Court of North Carolina denied certiorari on February 5, 1999, his state post-conviction review remained "pending" under the AEDPA past that date, delaying the start of the one-year period in which he could have filed a timely petition. See 28 U.S.C.A. § 2244(d)(2); Hernandez, 225 F.3d at 439. He provides two theories to support this view.

Rouse first contends that his motion for appropriate relief remained pending for twenty days after certiorari was denied, until ...