United States ex rel. Meadows v. State of New York, 95

Citation426 F.2d 1176
Decision Date05 May 1970
Docket NumberDocket 33147.,No. 95,95
PartiesUNITED STATES of America ex rel. Stanley MEADOWS, Appellant, v. STATE OF NEW YORK and Warden of the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta, Georgia, Appellees.
CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit)

Daniel D. Adams, New York City, submitted brief for appellant.

Louis J. Lefkowitz, Atty. Gen. of State of New York (Samuel A. Hirshowitz, First Asst. Atty. Gen., Lillian Z. Cohen, Asst. Atty. Gen., of counsel), submitted brief for appellee State of New York.

Before WATERMAN, MOORE, and KAUFMAN, Circuit Judges.

IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Circuit Judge:

Meadows appeals from the denial of his application for a writ of habeas corpus by the District Court. He claims that the failure of the state prosecutor to disclose to him the evidence possessed and the role played by two grand jury witnesses deprived him of his constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. Therefore, he contends his convictions on the charges contained in the grand jury indictment are invalid.

I. Facts

On September 11, 1958, Meadows was convicted for petit larceny, assault, and three counts of robbery in the County Court of Suffolk County, New York. These are the convictions he seeks to overturn on this appeal. He received a 10-20 year sentence on one count of robbery and suspended sentences on the other counts. His challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence and the instructions of the court were rejected on his direct appeal, see People v. Meadows, 12 A.D.2d 943, 214 N.Y.S.2d 264 (2d Dept. 1961), and leave to appeal to the New York Court of Appeals denied, see People v. Meadows, 13 A.D.2d 664, 215 N.Y.S.2d 473 (2d Dept. 1961). In 1965, having served eight years of his sentence, Meadows was paroled. But slightly more than one year later, after learning that Meadows had absconded and was wanted by federal authorities in connection with two bank robberies, the New York State Board of Parole issued a warrant declaring him delinquent and a certified copy of the warrant (known as a parole detainer) was lodged with the federal authorities. This detainer remains outstanding.

In June 1967 Meadows entered a plea of guilty to two charges of bank robbery in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York. For these crimes he received two concurrent 14-year sentences. He is now serving these sentences in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia and does not contest the validity of his federal convictions.

In September 1966, before pleading guilty to the federal charges, Meadows moved for a writ of error coram nobis in the County Court of Suffolk County, presenting the same claim which is now before us, that he had been denied the right to confront two witnesses who had appeared before the grand jury which indicted him in 1958. The denial of this application, on the ground that Meadows' failure to request production of the witnesses at trial had resulted in a waiver of his confrontation claim, was affirmed by the Appellate Division in 1968. Later that year both the Appellate Division and the New York Court of Appeals denied Meadows leave to appeal to the Court of Appeals.

On October 22, 1968, a month after the New York Court of Appeals had denied him leave to appeal, Meadows presented his sixth amendment claims in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus brought in the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, the district in which he is presently incarcerated. The petition was transferred to the Eastern District of New York, the district within which Meadows' state court trial took place. There, Judge Bruchhausen denied the petition on the grounds that Meadows was not "in custody" under his state court conviction and that he had failed to exhaust his state court remedies.

II. Exhaustion of State Court Remedies

We are of the view that the district court erred in deciding that Meadows' failure to present his sixth amendment claims on direct appeal in the state courts constituted either a waiver of these claims or a failure to exhaust his state court remedies. We do not believe that Meadows can be said to have made a knowing waiver of his constitutional claims by not raising them on direct appeal. First, he alleges that he did not learn of the information which forms the basis of these claims until 1965, four years after the New York Court of Appeals had denied him leave to appeal. Second, the sixth amendment right to confrontation, upon which he bases his claims, was not made applicable to the states until 1965. Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400, 85 S.Ct. 1065, 13 L.Ed.2d 923 (1965). In 1966, the year after he obtained the factual and legal bases for his constitutional arguments, Meadows exhausted all available state court remedies by presenting his constitutional claims in a motion for a writ of error coram nobis and appealing the denial of this motion to the highest court of the state of New York.1

III. Custody

A second threshold question raised on this appeal is whether Meadows may be said to be "in custody" under the New York state conviction which he asks us to declare invalid. It is well established that although Meadows is not presently serving a sentence imposed as a result of that conviction he is not foreclosed from challenging it in habeas corpus proceedings. The writ may be employed to contest the validity of future as well as present restraints. "A prisoner serving consecutive sentences is `in custody' under any one of them for purposes of § 2241(c) (3)." Peyton v. Rowe, 391 U.S. 54, 67, 88 S.Ct. 1549, 1556 (1968). Although it is true that the two consecutive sentences of the petitioner in Peyton had been imposed by the same jurisdiction and Meadows seeks to challenge a state conviction while serving a federal sentence, we cannot agree with the district judge that this is a distinction which forecloses us from applying to this case the clearly stated rule and rationale announced in Peyton. Meadows' interest in securing prompt adjudication of his constitutional claims is just as compelling as was Rowe's. Whether consecutive sentences have been imposed by the same or different jurisdictions does not affect the wisdom of a rule which requires conducting "meaningful factual inquiries * * * before memories and records grow stale." Peyton v. Rowe, 391 U.S. 54, 65, 88 S.Ct. 1549, 1555 (1968).

Neither do we perceive a sound reason for refusing to apply the Peyton rule because the restraint sought to be imposed on Meadows by the state of New York is not pursuant to a sentence to be served in the future but the result of a parole detainer already lodged but to take effect in the future. It is agreed that because of the parole detainer, Meadows will not be placed at liberty when his federal prison term is completed; instead, he will be delivered into the custody of the appropriate New York state authorities for them to make such disposition of the detainer as they deem proper. The detainer, after all, represents a present claim by New York of jurisdiction over Meadows' person and of the right to subject him to its orders and supervision in the future. As such, it constitutes sufficient "custody" to render the remedy of habeas corpus available to Meadows. E. g., Word v. North Carolina, 406 F.2d 352 (4th Cir. 1969); George v. Nelson, 410 F.2d 1179 (9th Cir.), cert. granted, 396 U.S. 955, 90 S.Ct. 433, 24 L.Ed.2d 419 (1969); United States ex rel. Van Scoten v. Pennsylvania, 404 F.2d 767 (3d Cir. 1968).

IV. Jurisdiction

Once it is established that Meadows may now attack his New York state conviction by an application for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal courts a more troublesome issue requires resolution — which district court or courts have jurisdiction to consider his petition. Meadows is presently incarcerated, pursuant to a federal sentence, in a federal penitentiary located in the Northern District of Georgia; he seeks to challenge a New York conviction and sentence imposed within the Eastern District of New York. Since our jurisdiction over this appeal rests upon the jurisdiction of the court below, the precise question before us is whether, despite Meadows' present confinement in the state of Georgia, a district court in the Eastern District of New York, the sentencing district, may properly take jurisdiction over his collateral attack on a New York conviction. The courts have been unable to reach agreement over the proper resolution of this jurisdictional nicety. Compare Word v. North Carolina, 406 F.2d 352 (4th Cir. 1969) (en banc) (sentencing district has jurisdiction), with United States ex rel. Van Scoten v. Pennsylvania, 404 F.2d 767 (3d Cir. 1968) (sentencing district does not have jurisdiction), and George v. Nelson, 410 F.2d 1179 (9th Cir.) (district of incarceration has jurisdiction), cert. granted, 396 U.S. 955, 90 S.Ct. 433, 24 L.Ed.2d 419 (1969).2

The jurisdictional statute, 28 U.S.C. § 2241(a), provides that "writs of habeas corpus may be granted by the * * * district courts * * * within their respective jurisdictions." In Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U.S. 188, 68 S.Ct. 1443, 92 L.Ed. 1898 (1948), a case involving the predecessor of this statute, the Supreme Court considered the question "whether the words `within their respective jurisdictions' limit the district courts to inquiries into the causes of restraints of liberty of those confined or restrained within the territorial jurisdictions of those courts." 335 U.S. at 190, 68 S.Ct. at 1444. The petitioners in Ahrens were 120 Germans, deemed to have been threats to the national security during World War II and confined at Ellis Island, New York prior to deportation. By their petition for habeas corpus, which they filed in the district court for the District of Columbia, they sought immediate release from present physical confinement. The Court affirmed a dismissal for want of jurisdiction, observing "that the jurisdiction of the District Court to...

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