Torres v. Kernan
- Phyllis Hamilton
- 4:20-cv-03159
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Torres v. Kernan, Judge Hamilton reopened the habeas case, vacated the judgment, and treated a later petition as an amended petition.
Mario Torres’s federal habeas case was reopened, and his petition from the related 2021 case was added as an amended petition. Scott Kernan was ordered to respond to the amended claims.
What happened
In Torres v. Kernan, Mario Torres, representing himself, filed a petition challenging his state conviction under a federal law allowing state prisoners to seek federal review. The court had denied that petition on the merits, closed the case, and entered judgment on February 25, 2022.
The court reopened the case and vacated that judgment. It ordered that Torres’s petition from a related 2021 case be filed here and treated as an amended petition. The related case would be closed, and Scott Kernan was ordered to respond to the amended claims.
Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton issued the March 1, 2022 order. This order reorganized and reopened the proceedings; it did not decide the amended petition’s claims.
The detailed version
- Torres v. Kernan · No. 4:20-cv-03159
- Phyllis Hamilton
- Mar. 1, 2022
Background
Mario Torres, proceeding without a lawyer, brought this federal petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, which permits a state prisoner to seek federal review of a conviction or sentence. The court stated that it had denied the petition on the merits, closed the case, and entered judgment on February 25, 2022.
On the same date, Scott Kernan filed a motion to relate this case to another case Torres filed in 2021, No. 21-cv-2406 YGR. The opinion states that the other case involved claims from the same underlying conviction. It also explains that, under Ninth Circuit precedent, when a self-represented petitioner files a second petition before the first petition has been fully adjudicated, the second petition should be treated as a motion to amend the pending petition. The court said it would relate the cases in a separate order.
Order
The court ordered three things:
- It reopened this case and vacated the judgment entered at Docket No.
- 2. It ordered that the petition filed at Docket No. 1 in the 2021 case be docketed in this case and construed as an amended petition.
- It ordered the respondent to file a response to the claims in the amended petition, following the instructions in the order to show cause issued in the 2021 case.
The court also stated that the 2021 case would be closed in a separate order so that future filings would be made in this case. This order did not resolve the claims in the amended petition.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.