Mayle v. Felix
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Mayle v. Felix
___ U.S. ___ (June 23, 2005)
Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the Court.
This case involves two federal prescriptions: the one-year limitation period imposed on federal habeas corpus petitioners by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1); and the rule that pleading amendments relate back to the filing date of the original pleading when both the original plea and the amendment arise out of the same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence," Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 15(c)(2).
Jacoby Lee Felix, California prisoner and federal habeas petitioner, was convicted in California state court of first-degree murder and second-degree robbery, and received a life sentence. Within the one-year limitation period AEDPA allows for habeas petitions, Felix filed a pro se petition in federal court. He initially alleged, inter alia, that the admission into evidence of videotaped testimony of a witness for the prosecution violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause. Five months after the expiration of AEDPA's time limit, and eight months after the federal court appointed counsel to represent him, Felix filed an amended petition in which he added a new claim for relief: He asserted that, in the course of pretrial interrogation, the police used coercive tactics to obtain damaging statements from him, and that admission of those statements at trial violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The question presented concerns the timeliness of Felix's Fifth Amendment claim.
In ordinary civil proceedings, the governing Rule, Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, requires only "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief." Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 8(a)(2). Rule 2(c) of the Rules Governing Habeas Corpus Cases requires a more detailed statement. The habeas rule instructs the petitioner to "specify all the grounds for relief available to [him]" and to "state the facts supporting each ground." By statute, Congress provided that a habeas petition "may be amended . . . as provided in the rules of procedure applicable to civil actions." 28 U.S.C. § 2242. The Civil Rule on amended pleadings, Rule 15 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, instructs: "An amendment of a pleading relates back to the date of the original pleading when . . . the claim . . . asserted in the amended pleading arose out of the conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth or attempted to be set forth in the original pleading." Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 15(c)(2).
The issue before us is one on which federal appellate courts have divided: Whether, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(c)(2), Felix's amended petition, filed after AEDPA's one-year limitation and targeting his pretrial statements, relates back to the date of his original timely filed petition, which targeted the videotaped witness testimony. Felix urges, and the Court of Appeals held, that the amended petition qualifies for relation back because both the original petition and the amended pleading arose from the same trial and conviction. We reverse the Court of Appeals' judgment in this regard. An amended habeas petition, we hold, does not relate back (and thereby escape AEDPA's one-year time limit) when it asserts a new ground for relief supported by facts that differ in both time and type from those the original pleading set forth.
I.
In 1995, after a jury trial in Sacramento, California, respondent Jacoby Lee Felix was found guilty of murder and robbery stemming from his participation in a carjacking in which the driver of the car was shot and killed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The current controversy centers on two alleged errors at Felix's trial. Both involve the admission of out-of-court statements during the prosecutor's case in chief, but the two are otherwise unrelated. One prompted a Fifth Amendment self-incrimination objection originally raised in the trial court, the other, a Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause challenge, also raised in the trial proceedings.
Felix's Fifth Amendment claim rested on the prosecution's introduction of statements Felix made during pretrial police interrogation. These statements were adduced at trial on direct examination of the investigating officer. Felix urged that the police used coercive tactics to elicit the statements. His Sixth Amendment claim related to the admission of the videotaped statements prosecution witness Kenneth Williams made at a jailhouse interview. The videotape records Williams, a friend of Felix, telling the police that he had overheard a conversation in which Felix described the planned robbery just before it occurred. When Williams testified at trial that he did not recall the police interview, the trial court determined that Williams' loss of memory was feigned, and that the videotape was admissible because it contained prior inconsistent statements.
On direct appeal, Felix urged, inter alia, that the admission of Williams' videotaped statements violated Felix's constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. He did not, however, argue that admission of his own pretrial statements violated his right to protection against self-incrimination. The intermediate appellate court affirmed Felix's conviction and sentence, and the California Supreme Court denied his petition for review. Felix's conviction became final on August 12, 1997.
Under AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations, Felix had until August 12, 1998 to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. Within the one-year period, on May 8, 1998, he filed a pro se petition for federal habeas relief. Felix's federal petition repeated his Sixth Amendment objection to the admission of the Williams videotape, but he again failed to reassert the objection he made in the trial court to the admission of his own pretrial statements. On May 29, 1998, a Magistrate Judge appointed counsel to represent Felix. Thereafter, on September 15, 1998, the Magistrate Judge ordered Felix to file an amended petition within 30 days. On Felix's unopposed requests, that period was successively extended. . . . .
On January 28, 1999, over five months after the August 12, 1998 expiration of AEDPA's time limit, and eight months after the appointment of counsel to represent him, Felix filed an amended petition. In this pleading, he reasserted his Confrontation Clause claim, and also asserted, for the first time post-trial, that his own pretrial statements to the police were coerced and therefore inadmissible at trial. Further, healleged that his counsel on appeal to the California intermediate appellate court was ineffective in failing to raise the coerced confession claim on direct appeal. In its answer to the amended petition, the State asserted that the Fifth Amendment claim was time barred because it was initially raised after the expiration of AEDPA's one-year limitation period. Felix argued in response that the new claim related back to the date of his original petition. Because both Fifth Amendment and Confrontation Clause claims challenged the constitutionality of the same criminal conviction, Felix urged, the Fifth Amendment claim arose out of the "conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth . . . in the original pleading," Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 15(c)(2).
The Magistrate Judge recommended dismissal of Felix's Fifth Amendment coerced statements claim. . . . Adopting the Magistrate Judge's report and recommendation in full, the District Court dismissed the Fifth Amendment claim as time barred, and rejected the Confrontation Clause claim on its merits.
A divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court's dismissal of Felix's Confrontation Clause claim, but reversed the dismissal of his coerced statements claim and remanded that claim for further proceedings. . . . .
We granted certiorari, to resolve the conflict among Courts of Appeals on relation back of habeas petition amendments. We now reverse the Ninth Circuit's judgment to the extent that it allowed relation back of Felix's Fifth Amendment claim.
II.
A.
In enacting AEDPA in 1996, Congress imposed for the first time a fixed time limit for collateral attacks in federal court on a judgment of conviction. Section 2244(d)(1) provides: "A 1-year period of limitation shall apply to an application for a writ of habeas corpus by a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court."
A discrete set of Rules governs federal habeas proceedings launched by state prisoners. The last of those Rules, Habeas Corpus Rule 11, permits application of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in habeas cases "to the extent that [the civil rules] are not inconsistent with any statutory provisions or [the habeas] rules." Rule 11, the Advisory Committee's Notes caution, "permits application of the civil rules only when it would be appropriate to do so," and would not be "inconsistent or inequitable in the overall framework of habeas corpus." In addition to the general prescriptions on application of the civil rules in federal habeas cases, § 2242 specifically provides that habeas applications "may be amended . . . as provided in the rules of procedure applicable to civil actions."
The Civil Rule governing pleading amendments, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15, made applicable to habeas proceedings by § 2242, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 81(a)(2), and Habeas Corpus Rule 11, allows pleading amendments with "leave of court" any time during a proceeding. Before a responsive pleading is served, pleadings may be amended once as a "matter of course," i.e., without seeking court leave. Amendments made after the statute of limitations has run relate back to the date of the original pleading if the original and amended pleadings "ar[i]se out of the conduct, transaction, or occurrence."
The "original pleading" to which Rule 15 refers is the complaint in an ordinary civil case, and the petition in a habeasproceeding. Under Rule 8(a), applicable to ordinary civil proceedings, a complaint need only provide "fair notice of what the plaintiff's claim is and the grounds upon which it rests." Habeas Corpus Rule 2(c) is more demanding. It provides that the petition must "specify all the grounds for relief available to the petitioner" and "state the facts supporting each ground." Accordingly, the model form available to aid prisoners in filing their habeas petitions instructs in boldface:
CAUTION: You must include in this petition all the grounds for relief from the conviction or sentence that you challenge. And you must state the facts that support each ground. If you fail to set forth all the grounds in this petition, you may be barred from presenting additional grounds at a later date.
A prime purpose of Rule 2(c)'s demand that habeas petitioners plead with particularity is to assist the district court in determining whether the State should be ordered to "show cause why the writ should not be granted." § 2243. Under Habeas Corpus Rule 4, if "it plainly appears from the petition . . . that the petitioner is not entitled to relief in district court," the court must summarily dismiss the petition without ordering a responsive pleading. If the court orders the State to file an answer, that pleading must "address the allegations in the petition."
B.
This case turns on the meaning of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(c)(2)'s relation-back provision in the context of federal habeas proceedings and AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations. Rule 15(c)(2), as earlier stated, provides that pleading amendments relate back to the date of the original pleading when the claim asserted in the amended plea "arose out of the conduct, transaction, or occurrence set forth or attempted to be set forth in the original pleading." The key words are "conduct, transaction, or occurrence." The Ninth Circuit, whose judgment we here review, in accord with the Seventh Circuit, defines those words to allow relation back of a claim first asserted in an amended petition, so long as the new claim stems from the habeas petitioner's trial, conviction, or sentence. Under that comprehensive definition, virtually any new claim introduced in an amended petition will relate back, for federal habeas claims, by their very nature, challenge the constitutionality of a conviction or sentence, and commonly attack proceedings anterior thereto.
The majority of Circuits, mindful of "Congress' decision to expedite collateral attacks by placing stringent time restrictions on [them]," define "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" in federal habeas cases less broadly. They allow relation back only when the claims added by amendment arise from the same core facts as the timely filed claims, and not when the new claims depend upon events separate in "both time and type" from the originally raised episodes. Because Felix's own pretrial statements, newly raised in his amended petition, were separated in time and type from witness Williams' videotaped statements, raised in Felix's original petition, the former would not relate back under the definition of "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" to which most Circuits adhere.
We are not aware, in the run-of-the-mine civil proceedings Rule 15 governs, of any reading of "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" as capacious as the construction the Ninth and Seventh Circuits have adopted for habeas cases. . . . . As these decisions illustrate, Rule 15(c)(2) relaxes, but does not obliterate, the statute of limitations; hence relation back depends on the existence of a common "core of operative facts" uniting the original and newly asserted claims.
Felix asserts that he seeks, and the Ninth Circuit accorded, no wider range for Rule 15(c)'s relation back provision than this Court gave to the Rule's key words "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" in Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 323 U.S. 574, 580-581 (1945). We disagree. In Tiller, a railroad worker was struck and killed by a railroad car. His widow sued under the Federal Employers Liability Act, to recover for his wrongful death. She initially alleged various negligent acts. In an amended complaint, she added a claim under the Federal Boiler Inspection Act for failure to provide the train's locomotive with a rear light. We held that the amendment related back, and therefore avoided a statute of limitations bar, even though the amendment invoked a legal theory not suggested by the original complaint and relied on facts not originally asserted.
There was but one episode-in-suit in Tiller, a worker's death attributed from the start to the railroad's failure to provide its employee with a reasonably safe place to work. The federal rulemakers recognized that personal injury plaintiffs often cannot pinpoint the precise cause of an injury prior to discovery. They therefore included in the Appendix to the Federal Rules an illustrative form indicating that a personal injury plaintiff could adequately state a claim for relief simply by alleging that the defendant negligently operated a certain instrumentality at a particular time and place. The widow in Tiller met that measure. She based her complaint on a single "occurrence," an accident resulting in her husband's death. In contrast, Felix targeted separate episodes, the pretrial police interrogation of witness Williams in his original petition, his own interrogation at a different time and place in his amended petition.
Felix contends, however, that his amended petition qualifies for relation back because the trial itself is the "transaction" or "occurrence" that counts. Citing Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003) (plurality opinion), Felix urges that neither the videotaped interview with witness Williams nor the pretrial police interrogation to which Felix himself was exposed transgressed any constitutional limitation. Until the statements elicited by the police were introduced at trial, Felix argues, he had no actionable claim at all. Both the confrontation right he timely presentedand the privilege against self-incrimination he asserted in his amended petition are "trial right[s]," Felix underscores. His claims based on those rights, he maintains, are not "separate”; rather, they are related in time and type, for "they arose on successive days during the trial and both challenged [on constitutional grounds] admission of pretrial statements.”
Felix artificially truncates his claims by homing in only on what makes them actionable in a habeas proceeding. We do not here question his assertion that his Fifth Amendment right did not ripen until his statements were admitted against him at trial. See Chavez, 538 U.S., at 766-767. Even so, the essential predicate for his self-incrimination claim was an extrajudicial event, i.e., an out-of-court police interrogation. The dispositive question in an adjudication of that claim would be the character of Felix's conduct, not in court, but at the police interrogation, specifically, did he answer voluntarily or were his statements coerced.
Habeas Corpus Rule 2(c), we earlier noted, instructs petitioners to "specify all [available] grounds for relief" and to "state the facts supporting each ground." Under that Rule, Felix's Confrontation Clause claim would be pleaded discretely, as would his self-incrimination claim. Each separate congeries of facts supporting the grounds for relief, the Rule suggests, would delineate an "occurrence." Felix's approach, the approach that prevailed in the Ninth Circuit, is boundless by comparison. A miscellany of claims for relief could be raised later rather than sooner and relate back, for "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" would be defined to encompass any pretrial, trial, or post-trial error that could provide a basis for challenging the conviction. An approach of that breadth, as the Fourth Circuit observed, "views 'occurrence' at too high a level of generality."
Congress enacted AEDPA to advance the finality of criminal convictions. To that end, it adopted a tight time line, a one-year limitation period ordinarily running 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." If claims asserted afterthe one-year period could be revived simply because they relate to the same trial, conviction, or sentence as a timely filed claim, AEDPA's limitation period would have slim significance. The very purpose of Rule 15(c)(2), as the dissent notes, is to "qualify a statute of limitations." But "qualify" does not mean repeal. Given AEDPA's "finality" and "federalism" concerns, it would be anomalous to allow relation back under Rule 15(c)(2) based on a broader reading of the words "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" in federal habeas proceedings than in ordinary civil litigation.
Felix urges that an unconstrained reading of Rule 15(c)(2) is not problematic because Rule 15(a) arms district courts with "ample power" to deny leave to amend when justice so requires. Under that Rule, once a responsive pleading has been filed, a prisoner may amend the petition "only by leave of court or by written consent of the adverse party." This argument overlooks a pleader's right to amend without leave of court "any time before a responsive pleading is served." Rule 15(a). In federal habeas cases that time can be rather long, as indeed it was in the instant case. Under Habeas Corpus Rule 4, a petition is not immediately served on the respondent. The judge first examines the pleading to determine whether "it plainly appears . . . that the petitioner is not entitled to relief." Only if the petition survives that preliminary inspection will the judge "order the respondent to file an answer." In the interim, the petitioner may amend his pleading "as a matter of course," as Felix did in this very case. Accordingly, we do not regard Rule 15(a) as a firm check against petition amendments that present new claims dependent upon discrete facts after AEDPA's limitation period has run.
Our rejection of Felix's translation of same "conduct, transaction, or occurrence" to mean same "trial, conviction, or sentence" scarcely leaves Rule 15(c)(2) "meaningless in the habeas context." So long as the original and amended petitions state claims that are tied to a common core of operative facts, relation back will be in order. Our reading isconsistent with the general application of Rule 15(c)(2) in civil cases, with Habeas Corpus Rule 2(c), and with AEDPA's installation of a tight time line for § 2254 petitions.
* * *
As to the question presented, for the reasons stated, the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
The dissenting opinion of Justice Souter, with whom Justice Stevens joins, is omitted.
