James v. Diaz

Background

Edbert James III, a state prisoner representing himself, filed a federal petition challenging his state conviction under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. According to the petition, a Contra Costa County Superior Court jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and three counts of felony child endangerment. The jury also found the personal-use allegations true. The state court sentenced him on February 9, 2018, to 116 years and eight months in prison. His appeals to the state appellate and highest courts were unsuccessful.

James filed this federal action on October 16, 2019. He also requested permission to proceed without paying filing fees and asked the court to stay the federal case so he could present newly discovered claims in state court. Those additional claims alleged ineffective assistance by trial and appellate counsel and cumulative error.

Stay of the Federal Case

A state prisoner generally must first give the highest available state court a fair opportunity to decide each federal claim before seeking federal relief. Because James identified claims that had not been presented in state court, the court treated the petition as containing both exhausted and unexhausted claims.

The court applied the stay procedure described in Rhines v. Webber. That procedure allows a federal court to pause a petition while the prisoner exhausts state remedies, but only when the prisoner has good cause for not previously exhausting the claims, the claims could have merit, and the prisoner has not used delay tactics. The court found that James had not engaged in delay tactics and that his unexhausted claims were potentially meritorious.

Order and Effect

The court granted James’s request to stay the petition until 28 days after the California Supreme Court issued its final decision on the unexhausted claims. It also granted his motion for permission to proceed without paying filing fees.

The court instructed that, if James wanted the federal court to consider the unexhausted claims, he had to present them properly to the California Supreme Court. If he did not obtain relief there, he had to notify the federal court within 28 days of that court’s decision by filing a motion to reopen and stating that all claims in the federal petition had been exhausted. The clerk was ordered to administratively close the file while the stay was in effect; the order explained that this was only a statistical procedure and had no legal effect. Judge Beth Labson Freeman’s order terminated the two motions addressed in the order. It did not decide whether James’s conviction or additional claims were legally valid.