Young v. Pollard

Background

Brian Jason Young, a state prisoner, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging his 2017 amended judgment in Alameda County Superior Court. He alleged that he was resentenced without being present and without his lawyer, that a new law affected whether burglary could be treated as a violent felony for sentence enhancement purposes, and that there was an error involving the sentence for robbery.

The state court originally convicted Young in 2012 of rape, robbery, false imprisonment, and evading a peace officer, and sentenced him to 23 years and eight months in prison. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the convictions in 2014 but sent the case back for the trial court to decide whether to impose or strike certain one-year sentence enhancements. Young was resentenced on November 16, 2017, to 23 years and eight months. He did not appeal that resentencing.

Young later filed state habeas petitions in the California Court of Appeal and California Supreme Court. The state appellate petition raised claims concerning self-representation and the admission and exclusion of evidence, while the state supreme court petition challenged the denial of the appellate petition without an evidentiary hearing. The court found that those petitions did not raise the three claims in Young’s federal petition.

Timeliness

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act requires a state prisoner generally to file a federal habeas petition within one year after the judgment becomes final, subject to specified exceptions. Because Young did not appeal his resentencing, the court determined that the judgment became final 60 days after November 16, 2017, on January 15, 2018. The one-year period therefore began the next day and ordinarily expired on January 15, 2019.

The court also determined that Young received 135 days of statutory tolling for the period during which his state habeas petitions were pending, from January 29, 2018, through June 13, 2018. With that tolling, the deadline was May 30, 2019. The court found that Young’s federal petition, filed in October 2022, was filed more than three years after that deadline and was untimely.

Exhaustion

Before seeking federal habeas relief, a state prisoner must give the state’s highest court a fair opportunity to rule on each federal claim. The court found that Young had not presented any of the three claims in his federal petition to the California Supreme Court. Although Young ordinarily could have sought a stay to return to state court and exhaust the claims, the court found that doing so would be futile because the petition was already untimely.

Disposition

The court granted Respondent Marcus Pollard’s motion to dismiss. It dismissed the petition with prejudice as untimely and for failure to exhaust state judicial remedies before filing. The court denied Young’s motion for a case-status hearing as moot, found that no certificate of appealability was warranted, and terminated Docket Nos. 23 and 24.