By: Deborah Yaffe
The Recorder
June 4, 1996
The state Supreme Court's old procedural rules for handling death row inmates' habeas corpus claims were hopelessly muddled, defense lawyers have long griped. The court itself may have agreed, for it established a new set of rules in the 1993 decision In re Clark.
Now the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has joined the chorus of criticism, ruling Tuesday that federal courts should not reject prisoners' habeas claims just because the California court found that the claims were filed too late.
While the Ninth Circuit ruling potentially affects scores of pending capital cases, it sidesteps a more pressing issue: whether the court's more recent rules, set down in the July 1993 Clark opinion, 855 P.2d 729, are clear and consistent enough to solve the earlier problems.
Nevertheless, the ruling in Morales v. Calderon, 96 C.D.O.S. 3955, marks the first time the Ninth Circuit has weighed in on the question of whether California's pre-Clark timeliness rule constituted an adequate bar to federal review.
Federal courts can refuse to review habeas claims that a state court has rejected for violating state filing procedures. But state procedural rules do not cut off federal review if the state rules are unclear or inconsistently applied. In the case of Michael Morales -- who was sentenced to death in 1983 for raping and murdering a teen-age girl in Stockton -- the Ninth Circuit found California's pre-1993 rules were both.
The ruling reverses the district court, which rejected Morales' habeas claims because the state Supreme Court had time-barred them. Morales now has the chance for a federal court hearing on the merits of his claims.
Judge William Canby Jr. wrote the opinion, which was joined by Judges Jerome Farris and David Thompson.
The California rule, established in June 1989, said a habeas petition was presumed timely if filed within 60 days of briefing deadlines for the state direct appeal (that timetable was changed a year later to 90 days). But, Canby wrote, "there was no discernible clear rule for petitions filed more than 90 days after the due date for the reply brief on direct appeal."
In the past three years, a number of district courts have reached the same conclusion, and so the Ninth Circuit ruling is not surprising or especially significant, said Gardner & Derham's Cliff Gardner, who has worked on eight death penalty cases.
"The real issue is going to be whether they've done it in the post-Clark era," Gardner said.
Deputy Attorney General Dane Gillette, the office's capital casecoordinator, also downplayed the significance of the Morales decision, which he had not seen Tuesday afternoon.
"This is an issue that we've been litigating for a number of years," Gillette said. "We're still relying on it, but we've also lost it in a lot of cases."
Gillette said he does not know how many cases pending in federal court are, like Morales', pre-Clark cases in which district courts have refused to review habeas claims because those claims were rejected by the state court for reasons of timeliness.
And David Senior, the partner at Los Angeles' Condon & Forsyth who represented Morales, noted that part of his argument turned on the rarity of his case.
"We were treated significantly differently than lots of other people who had been in the same position that we were," Senior said.
Of 35 habeas petitions filed, like Morales', three years after the end of state direct appeal, the state Supreme Court denied only six for untimeliness alone, Senior argued. More than half were denied on the merits alone.
The state argued that this pattern merely showed that discretion was involved in the application of the timeliness rule. But the Ninth Circuit panel rejected that argument.
"Discretion is the exercise of judgment according to standards that, at least over time, can become known and understood within reasonable operating limits," Canby wrote.
(The Recorder is an affiliate publication of Court TV.)
Copyright 1996, American Lawyer Media.
