Clark v. Minnesota Department of Correction

Background

Carlos P. Clark, aka Carlos Heard, was incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility–Rush City. A jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and third-degree murder, and he received a 493-month sentence. The Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction, and the Minnesota Supreme Court denied review on October 24, 2012.

Clark later filed two state-court motions for post-conviction relief. The first was filed in March 2014, denied, and affirmed on appeal; he did not seek review by the Minnesota Supreme Court. The second was filed on June 6, 2016, denied on April 14, 2017, and not appealed.

Clark filed this federal petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 on October 27, 2017. He argued that his conviction was invalid because he had been arrested without a warrant and that the trial court therefore lacked authority over him. He acknowledged that he had not previously raised this claim in any court.

Magistrate Judge’s Recommendation and Objection

Magistrate Judge Hildy Bowbeer recommended denying Clark’s petition and dismissing the action with prejudice because it was barred by the federal one-year statute of limitations. The recommendation also advised denying a certificate of appealability, which is required for a petitioner to appeal an adverse ruling on a federal constitutional claim.

Clark objected. Although the precise nature of his objection was unclear, he appeared to argue that the filing deadline did not apply because his petition raised a challenge to the trial court’s authority and such challenges can be raised at any time.

Court’s Analysis

The court explained that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act imposes a one-year deadline for filing a federal petition challenging a state conviction. The deadline generally begins when direct review ends or the time to seek further review expires. Here, the ninety-day period for seeking review by the United States Supreme Court ended in January 2013, so Clark had until January 2014 to file his federal petition.

Clark did not file his federal petition until October 27, 2017. State post-conviction proceedings can pause the running of the deadline while they are pending, but they do not restart a deadline that has already expired. Because Clark filed his first state post-conviction motion in March 2014, after the federal deadline had expired, that motion did not make his later federal petition timely.

The court also considered equitable tolling, which is an exceptional extension of the deadline. It requires a petitioner to show that he pursued his rights diligently and that extraordinary circumstances prevented a timely filing. The court agreed with the magistrate judge that Clark had not made that showing. The court further held that the deadline applies even when a petition alleges that the trial court lacked authority over the defendant; there is no exception for such a claim.

Disposition

Judge Susan Richard Nelson overruled Clark’s objection and adopted Magistrate Judge Bowbeer’s Report and Recommendation in its entirety. The court ordered that the matter be dismissed with prejudice as time-barred. It also ordered that no certificate of appealability be issued.