Meyers v. Clark

Background

Leon L. Meyers filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging the validity of his state-court sentence. The opinion states that he was sentenced in Alameda County Superior Court to 33 years to life for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, battery against a person with whom he had a dating relationship, and resisting a police officer resulting in serious bodily injury.

Meyers’s petition alleged that his due process rights were violated because the state courts did not follow their own procedures when they denied his motion to disqualify under California law and his petition for a writ of mandamus.

Court’s analysis

The court explained that a federal habeas petition is “second or successive” when the facts underlying the claim existed by the time of an earlier petition and the new petition challenges the same state-court judgment. Meyers had previously filed a habeas petition challenging this conviction and sentence. In that earlier round of the case, 44 claims were dismissed for failure to exhaust state remedies, while 10 claims were denied on the merits.

The court concluded that Meyers’s current claims were based on events occurring around 2010 to 2011, after which he filed the earlier petition. The court therefore treated the current petition as second or successive. It stated that it would not determine whether one of the 54 claims in the earlier petition had included the same allegations.

Under 28 U.S.C. § 2244, a second or successive petition requires authorization from the appropriate court of appeals before it may be filed in the district court. The court found that Meyers had not shown that he received this authorization. It also explained that the claims would remain barred even if they had not been included in the earlier petition, because they were known when the earlier petition was filed and did not satisfy the statutory exceptions for new constitutional rules or newly discovered facts. The court further stated that the claims would not establish that no reasonable factfinder could have found Meyers guilty.

Disposition

The court dismissed the petition as second or successive and for failure to obtain authorization from the court of appeals. It did not reach the merits of Meyers’s due process allegations. The court also ruled that a certificate of appealability would not issue because Meyers had not shown that reasonable jurists could debate whether the petition stated a valid constitutional claim or whether the court’s procedural ruling was correct.