Wyndel R. Hall v. Secretary, Department of Corrections
Opinion
*985
Wyndel R. Hall, a Florida prisoner proceeding
pro se
, appeals from the District Court's dismissal of his
I.
Hall was convicted of one count of capital sexual battery
1
and one count of resisting arrest or obstructing an officer without violence by a Polk County jury in 2010. He appealed, and the state appellate court affirmed his convictions and sentence on March 28, 2012.
See
Hall v. State
,
On April 11, 2013-289 days after the AEDPA limitations period began to run, with 76 days remaining-Hall filed a motion under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.800(a) to correct his sentence. This tolled the limitations period for the entirety of the Rule 3.800(a) proceeding, including the eventual appeal.
Evans v. Chavis
,
Fourteen days later on January 9, 2014, Hall filed an amended motion for postconviction relief in state court pursuant to Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850. At this point, Hall was down to 62 days. In his Rule 3.850 motion, Hall raised eight claims of ineffective assistance counsel, the same claims Hall would later raise in his § 2254 petition. The amended motion did not comply with Rule 3.850(n)(2), which required Hall to certify that he could understand English or that he'd had the motion translated into a language he could understand. Consequently, on February *986 14, 2014, the state habeas court dismissed Hall's motion "without prejudice to re-file a facially sufficient amended motion within sixty (60) days." State v. Hall , No. 08CF-4968-XX (Fla. Cir. Ct. Feb. 14, 2014). Hall then filed a second amended motion for postconviction relief as the court instructed on February 24, 2014. The state court denied the motion, and the denial was affirmed on appeal. The state appellate court issued its mandate on December 4, 2014.
Hall filed the present § 2254 petition on January 13, 2015. The State moved to dismiss Hall's petition as untimely under AEDPA's statute of limitations. According to the State, Hall's AEDPA clock-which the State identified as having begun on June 28, 2012 2 -expired December 22, 2014, rendering his January 13, 2015 § 2254 petition untimely. The State argued that Hall's initial Rule 3.850 motion, which he filed when he was 62 days short of AEDPA's statute of limitations, was not "properly filed" for AEDPA-tolling purposes because Hall failed to certify that he understood English. Instead, Hall's AEDPA clock wasn't tolled until he filed his second amended Rule 3.850 motion on February 24, 2014, leaving him only 16 days once the state court disposed of that motion. And because the state court issued its mandate on the Rule 3.850 motion on December 4, 2014, Hall's AEDPA clock expired on December 22, 2014 3 -22 days before he filed his § 2254 petition on January 13, 2015.
The District Court agreed with the State and dismissed Hall's motion. Hall timely appealed.
II.
We review
de novo
the dismissal of a federal habeas petition as time barred under
AEDPA establishes a one-year statute of limitations for federal habeas petitions filed by state prisoners, which runs from "the date on which the judgment became final by the conclusion of direct review or the expiration of the time for seeking such review."
As for tolling, the one-year limitations period for filing a § 2254 petition is tolled during the time in "which a properly filed application for State post-conviction or other collateral review with respect to the pertinent judgment or claim is pending."
*987
as "judicial review that occurs in a proceeding outside of the direct review process."
Wall v. Kholi
,
The issue in this case is whether Hall's initial Rule 3.850 motion-the one filed January 9, 2014, that was later dismissed because it lacked the Rule 3.850(n)(2) certification-tolled AEDPA's statute of limitations. If it did, Hall had 62 days after the state court ruled on it to file his § 2254 motion. But if the initial Rule 3.850 did not toll the Hall's AEDPA clock, he only had 16 days after the state court decided the Rule 3.850 motion to file his § 2254 motion. His January 13, 2015 § 2254 motion fell within the 62-day window, but not within the 16-day window.
Whether the initial Rule 3.850 motion tolled Hall's AEDPA clock turns on whether that motion was a "properly filed" application for state post-conviction relief.
This is not the first occasion we've been asked to determine whether a petitioner's defective filing in a Florida collateral proceeding tolled AEDPA's statute of limitations. In
Hurley v. Moore
,
By contrast, in
Green v. Secretary, Department of Corrections
, the petitioner initially filed an amended motion that did not comply with the oath requirement under Rule 3.850(c).
We reversed.
It's not hard to see which of these cases Hall's resembles. Hall's initial Rule 3.850 motion was improperly sworn and, for that reason, not "properly filed" under AEDPA. But the state habeas court dismissed his motion without prejudice to refile, and-rather than moving for a rehearing and pursuing an appeal, à la Hurley -Hall filed a properly sworn Rule 3.850 motion within the state court's prescribed time period. After Green , it's hard to escape the conclusion that Hall's corrected Rule 3.850 motion relates back to his initial, improperly sworn Rule 3.850 motion.
Of course, the State tries to escape that conclusion by arguing that Hall's case is distinguishable. Specifically, the State argues that in order to toll the statute of limitations under AEDPA, a state postconviction application must be both "properly filed" and "pending."
See
There are a couple problems with this argument. First, even if we assume that the AEPDA limitations period was tolled only when a motion was "pending," as the State uses that term, Hall's § 2254 motion was still timely. The period of time between the dismissal of Hall's deficient Rule 3.850 motion and his filing the corrected one-that is, the period of time in which there was no motion "pending" before the state court, according to this argument-was only 10 days: from February 14, 2014, when the faulty Rule 3.850 motion was dismissed, to February 24, 2014, when the proper Rule 3.850 motion was filed. 4 Under *989 this scenario, where the AEDPA clock was tolled during both Rule 3.850 proceedings apart from the 10-day interval where nothing was "pending" before the state court, Hall had until January 26, 2015, to file his § 2254. Hall met that deadline, so his § 2254 motion was timely even if we accept the State's argument.
And that's a big if. The State's "pending" argument is based on the (admittedly intuitive) notion that a state postconviction motion is no longer "pending" once dismissed. This might be true in the abstract.
See
Overton
, 155 F.Supp.3d at 1269 ("Logi[c] dictates that when [a motion] [i]s stricken from the record, the motion [i]s no longer 'pending.' "). But this approach upends the procedure Florida courts have developed for processing facially deficient postconviction motions. In
Spera v. State
,
The procedure articulated in Spera allows a defendant an opportunity to amend facially insufficient postconviction claims unless the claims cannot be corrected. Spera 's procedure applies uniformly to all insufficiently pled postconviction claims whether determined to be legally or facially insufficient . The trial court has discretion in determining the length of the defendant's leave to amend and Spera suggested thirty days would be reasonable.
...
[B]ased upon Spera and Nelson v. State , once the window of opportunity to amend expires and the defendant is unable or unwilling to cure the deficiency, the insufficient claim may be denied with prejudice .
Accordingly, for the purposes of tolling under
III.
The District Court was wrong to conclude that Hall's § 2254 motion was time barred. We reverse and remand for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
REVERSED AND REMANDED.
TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge, specially concurring:
I write separately to draw the Court's attention to our practice of incorrectly applying
Bond v. Moore
to Florida habeas petitioners. The District Court in this case concluded that Hall's conviction became final for AEDPA purposes on June 26, 2012-that is, 90 days after the Florida District Court of Appeal affirmed his conviction. This conclusion rested on
Bond v. Moore
,
But in this case, unlike in
Bond
,
1
Hall never sought review of his conviction by the Florida Supreme Court. This means that Hall was not entitled to the 90-day extension
Bond
requires because the decision of the Florida District Court of Appeal was not a "[f]inal judgment[ ] or decree[ ] rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had."
For the reasons explained in
Pugh v. Smith
, this practice makes little sense. Section 2244(d)(1) says that AEDPA's one-year limitations period "shall run," in circumstances like these, "from ... the date on which the judgment became final by the conclusion of direct review or the expiration of the time for seeking such review."
Neither the District Court nor the State raised this issue.
3
And because AEDPA's statute of limitations is not jurisdictional,
San Martin v. McNeil
,
Capital sexual battery was formerly punishable by death. Today, it is capital only in name.
See
Kennedy v. Louisiana
,
It looks like the State reached this date by simply adding three months to March 26, 2012, i.e. , the date on which the District Court of Appeal affirmed Hall's conviction. The problem with this method of computing when Hall's conviction became final for AEDPA purposes is that not every month has exactly 30 days. Indeed, two months in this interval-March and May-have not 30, but 31 days. See Gregorian Calendar , Wikipedia (last visited Mar. 25, 2019), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar.
The sixteenth day (December 20, 2014) fell on a Saturday, so Hall's AEDPA clock in this scenario would expire the following Monday, December 22, 2014. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 6(a)(1)(C) ("[I]f the last day [of the period] is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the period continues to run until the end of the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday.").
The State seems to think that its "pending" argument leads to the conclusion that the statute of limitations was not tolled
at all
by Hall's initial Rule 3.850 motion filed on January 9, 2014. But the district court opinion the State cites to support this argument reveals a critical flaw in the State's logic. In
Overton v. Jones
,
[T]he issue here[ ] is whether the April 30 Motion was 'pending' for the purposes of § 2244(d)(2) during the period of time [between when] the April 30 Motion was struck (June 12, 2003) and when [petitioner's] July 10 Motion was filed .... If [petitioner's] April 30 Motion was not going to be considered or reviewed by the trial court because the April 30 Motion had been struck from the record, it was not 'pending.'
Even if we accepted the Overton approach, it would not get the State to its desired outcome. Under Overton , Hall's deficient Rule 3.850 motion was "pending" from the time it was filed on January 9, 2014, to the time it was dismissed on February 14, 2014. His properly sworn Rule 3.850 motion was then filed on February 24. Hall would, therefore, only lose 10 days from his AEDPA clock, which would leave him with 52 days after the dismissal of the second Rule 3.850 motion on December 4, 2014, to file his § 2254 motion. That 52-day period would expire January 26, 2015, because January 25, 2015 was a Sunday. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 6(a)(1)(C). Hall's § 2254 motion was filed well before this deadline, so it was timely under Overton .
Carey v. Saffold
,
In
Bond
, the petitioner sought discretionary review of his conviction by the Florida Supreme Court, but review was denied.
Id.
at 771-72 (quoting
Bond v. State
,
See, e.g.
,
Kuhns v. California
,
The State probably declined to make this argument because we have precedent applying
Bond
's 90-day extension to petitioners whose direct review ended in the District Court of Appeal.
See
Chavers
,
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Wyndel R. HALL, Petitioner-Appellant, v. SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, Attorney General, State of Florida, Respondents-Appellees.
- Cited By
- 18 cases
- Status
- Published