Ellawendy v. Monterey County Superior Court

Background

Abdelfatah Ellawendy, a state parolee proceeding without a lawyer, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging his 2019 Monterey County conviction. The charges involved stalking, several assaults, and dissuading a witness from testifying. Under a negotiated plea, he pleaded no contest to one count of assault with a deadly weapon and agreed to serve no more than two years. The state trial court sentenced him to two years in prison.

The court previously determined that the only legally cognizable claim was whether Ellawendy’s plea was voluntary. It dismissed his other claims, which included alleged racial and gender bias, new evidence, witness perjury, lack of an interpreter when he signed the plea, and fabricated evidence. The respondent then filed an answer addressing the remaining claim on the merits.

Ellawendy later submitted another pleading, which the court treated as a motion for permission to file an amended petition. The proposed amendment added allegations that his lawyer gave deficient advice about the plea and repeated or expanded allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, judicial bias, and new evidence. The opinion refers to filings at different points as occurring on April 14, 2021, and July 8, 2021; the precise filing date of the proposed amended petition is therefore unclear from the text provided.

Reasoning

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15, as applied to habeas proceedings, generally allows amendments with the court’s permission after a response has been filed. Courts consider factors including bad faith, undue delay, prejudice, whether the amendment would be futile, and whether the party previously amended the pleading.

The court denied permission because the proposed amendment came late. The respondent had already answered, and Ellawendy had not adequately explained why he waited to add grounds challenging his plea. The court also noted that the amendment repeated claims previously dismissed and found no error in its earlier decision that those claims were not legally cognizable after the plea.

The court further found the amendment futile. The federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act generally imposes a one-year deadline for filing a state-prisoner’s federal habeas petition. The court concluded that the proposed amendment was filed after that period. Although some new plea-related claims might relate back to the original petition because they shared a common set of underlying facts, the court determined that Ellawendy had not first presented those claims to the state courts. The resulting petition would contain both exhausted and unexhausted claims and would be subject to dismissal. The court also declined to stay the case to allow exhaustion because Ellawendy had not shown good cause for the delay or explained why he had not raised the claims earlier.

Disposition

Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered that:

- Ellawendy’s motion for leave to file an amended petition was DENIED. - The amended petition at Docket No. 15 was STRUCK. - The stay on briefing regarding the respondent’s answer was LIFTED. - If Ellawendy wished to respond, he had to file and serve a traverse within 42 days after the order was filed.

The order did not decide the merits of the remaining challenge to the voluntariness of Ellawendy’s plea.