Maura Dolan reports in today’s Los Angeles Times about two concurring opinions in yesterday’s en banc Ninth Circuit decision in Curiel v. Miller. The case is another chapter in the interrelationship between state appellate courts on the one hand and, on the other hand, federal courts with their now-limited powers to grant habeas corpus relief.
A prerequisite to a federal court even considering the merits of Curiel’s habeas corpus petition was the timeliness of his earlier habeas petition to the California Supreme Court, a petition that was denied with no more than a citation to two of its earlier opinions. The Ninth Circuit interprets the brief denial order to mean that the Supreme Court found the petition was timely.
The concurring judges urge a better system so the federal courts don’t need to decipher the Supreme Court’s thousands of annual habeas petition denial orders. One of the judges — Stephen Reinhardt — sympathizes with “the plight of the California Supreme Court with its massive potential caseload and severely strained resources,” and criticizes the federal law — “the role of the federal courts in habeas cases has been eviscerated and federal judges have been compelled to say (perhaps in contravention of their oath of office): ‘I know this result is unfair, unjust, and unconstitutional, but I have been told that I must nevertheless defer to the view of the state courts—courts that may have had neither the time nor resources to fully review the constitutional errors involved.’”
The next word on the timeliness of state habeas petitions is likely to come in Robinson v. Lewis, where the Supreme Court has agreed to answer a Ninth Circuit plea for assistance.
