Chavez v. Matteson

Background

Marcos R. Chavez sought federal habeas relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 from state-court convictions. In 2016, he pleaded guilty in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court to robbery, kidnapping, voluntary manslaughter, making terrorist threats, assault with great bodily injury, and committing a hate crime. He received a 30-year sentence on March 7, 2016. The opinion states that, as part of his plea agreement, Chavez waived his appellate rights and his right to challenge his conviction through a collateral proceeding.

Chavez later filed habeas petitions in the state superior court, state appellate court, and state supreme court. Those petitions were filed in 2021 and 2022. The federal court treated Chavez’s federal petition as filed on May 2, 2022, under the prisoner mailbox rule, which generally uses the date a prisoner gives a filing to prison authorities for mailing.

Timeliness ruling

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) generally gives a person one year to file a federal habeas petition after the state conviction becomes final. The court determined that Chavez’s conviction became final on March 7, 2016, because he waived his appellate rights. It therefore concluded that the federal filing deadline was March 8, 2017. The court added that the petition would still have been untimely even if finality occurred 60 days after sentencing.

Chavez argued that he had raised newly discovered claims involving an allegedly unauthorized sentence, the absence of a waiver form, and the failure to advise him of his rights. The court found that he did not identify the relevant factual predicates, explain when he discovered them, or show why they could not have been discovered earlier through due diligence. The court also concluded that the facts underlying these claims would have been known to him at sentencing.

Tolling

The court rejected statutory tolling. Statutory tolling excludes from the one-year period time during which a properly filed state post-conviction petition is pending, but a state petition filed after the federal limitations period has expired cannot restart or revive that period. Because Chavez filed his first state habeas petition on April 23, 2021—after the March 8, 2017 deadline—the court found that he was not entitled to statutory tolling.

The court also rejected equitable tolling. Equitable tolling may extend the deadline when a petitioner has pursued his rights diligently and an extraordinary circumstance prevented timely filing. The court found that Chavez made no assertions showing either requirement. It further rejected his argument that California law allowed him to challenge an unauthorized sentence at any time, explaining that state-law rules did not control the timeliness of a federal petition under AEDPA.

Disposition

The court granted respondent’s motion to dismiss the petition as untimely and dismissed the petition. It directed the clerk to terminate all pending motions, enter judgment in favor of respondent, and close the file. The court stated that a certificate of appealability would not issue because Chavez had not made the required showing concerning the validity of a constitutional claim and the correctness of the court’s procedural ruling. The court noted that Chavez could seek a certificate of appealability from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.