Smith v. Spearman
- Susan Illston
- 3:20-cv-00322
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 4
In Smith v. Spearman, Judge Illston ordered briefing on possible habeas time bar and granted Smith permission to proceed without paying fees.
Anthony Smith and Spearman. The order required Spearman to address the possible filing deadline and allowed Smith to respond; it also allowed Smith to proceed without paying filing fees.
What happened
Anthony Smith, who was incarcerated, filed a petition challenging his 2009 burglary conviction. In Smith v. Spearman, the court said the petition might have been filed too late under the one-year federal deadline for state-prisoner cases.
The court did not decide whether the petition was too late or whether Smith’s claims had merit. It ordered Spearman to file either a motion to dismiss based on the deadline or a notice saying dismissal was not warranted. Smith was allowed to respond, and the court granted his request to proceed without paying filing fees.
Judge Susan Illston issued the order on May 20, 2020. The case remained pending, and the court said it would decide later whether to require a full response to the petition.
The detailed version
- Smith v. Spearman · No. 3:20-cv-00322
- Susan Illston
- May 20, 2020
Background
Anthony Smith, an incarcerated person proceeding without a lawyer, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging his 2009 Alameda County Superior Court burglary conviction. He had received a sentence of 37 years to life after sentence-enhancement allegations were found true. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction on August 24, 2011, and the California Supreme Court denied review on November 16, 2011. Smith filed his federal petition in January 2020.
Initial review and possible deadline problem
Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, a state prisoner generally has one year to file a federal petition challenging a non-capital conviction or sentence, subject to specified rules and exclusions for certain state post-conviction proceedings. The court stated that Smith’s petition was filed more than one year after his conviction became final and might therefore be untimely. It said this procedural issue should be addressed before reaching the substance of Smith’s claims.
Order
The court ordered Spearman to file and serve either a motion to dismiss the petition as untimely or a notice stating that a motion to dismiss was unwarranted by July 24, 2020. Smith could file an opposition by September 4, 2020, and Spearman could reply by September 25, 2020. The court did not decide the deadline issue or the merits of the habeas claims. It also granted Smith’s application to proceed without paying filing fees. Judge Susan Illston stated that, depending on the response to the possible dismissal motion, the court would later decide whether to require an answer to the petition.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.