Tineo-Santos v. Piccolo
- James Cott
- 1:19-cv-05038
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 17
In Tineo-Santos v. Piccolo, Judge Cott denied requests to add new habeas claims and pause the case because no good cause was shown.
Francisco Tineo-Santos’s pending federal habeas proceeding and his proposed new ineffective-assistance claims; the ruling denied his requests to amend the petition and pause the case for state-court exhaustion.
What happened
Tineo-Santos asked to add ineffective-assistance claims based on a 911 report and to pause his federal challenge while he pursued those claims in state court. He said the report supported his claim that trial and appellate lawyers had failed to use it.
The court assumed the new claims were timely and found they were not yet procedurally barred. But it found that the report had been in his lawyers’ files and that he had not shown a sufficient reason for failing to pursue the claims earlier.
Judge Cott denied the request to pause the case and denied the request to amend the petition. The court did not decide whether the proposed claims had merit.
The detailed version
- Tineo-Santos v. Piccolo · No. 1:19-cv-05038
- James Cott
- Jan. 27, 2021
Background
Francisco Tineo-Santos was convicted of second-degree murder in New York Supreme Court, Bronx County, on January 18, 2013, and sentenced to 25 years to life. He previously challenged the conviction through a New York Criminal Procedure Law § 440.10 motion alleging ineffective assistance of trial counsel. The state courts denied that challenge, and the New York Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal.
Tineo-Santos filed a federal habeas petition on May 30, 2019. A habeas petition is a request for federal relief from unlawful custody. His pending petition challenged the state-court decisions under the Sixth Amendment.
On February 28, 2020, Tineo-Santos moved to amend the petition and to stay, or pause, the federal proceeding while he exhausted new claims in state court. The proposed claims concerned a 911 report produced by the New York City Police Department on August 27, 2019, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request. Tineo-Santos alleged that the report suggested another person was at the crime scene and that his trial counsel failed to introduce it at trial. He also alleged that appellate counsel failed to present it in support of a state post-conviction motion. The court treated these as two separate proposed ineffective-assistance claims.
Court’s analysis
The court first considered timeliness under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s one-year limitation period for federal habeas claims. It determined that Tineo-Santos’s conviction became final on August 29, 2018, making August 29, 2019 the deadline for adding claims. Because the motion to amend was filed on February 28, 2020, the proposed claims were untimely unless they related back to the original petition. The court assumed, based on the respondent’s concession, that the proposed claims shared a common core of facts with the original petition and therefore could relate back.
The court also concluded that the proposed claims were not procedurally barred. It explained that the trial-counsel claim could be raised through another § 440.10 motion because New York law does not impose an absolute bar on successive motions. It further explained that the appellate-counsel claim should be presented through a writ of error coram nobis, a state-court procedure for challenging appellate counsel’s performance, and that nothing in the record showed that such a filing would be barred.
The court then applied the stay-and-abeyance standard. A stay and abeyance allows a federal habeas case containing unexhausted claims to pause while the petitioner presents those claims in state court. The petitioner must show good cause for not exhausting the claims earlier, that the claims are potentially meritorious, and that the litigation was not intentionally delayed.
The court found no good cause. Although Tineo-Santos said he learned about the 911 report through the later Freedom of Information Law production, the report had been maintained in both trial and appellate counsel’s files. The court found that he had not explained why he could not have discovered it earlier through reasonable diligence. As to the appellate-counsel claim, he also gave no explanation for not previously filing a coram nobis proceeding based on that claim.
Because Tineo-Santos failed to establish good cause, the court did not decide whether the proposed claims were potentially meritorious or whether he had intentionally delayed. The court stated that denying a stay made amendment futile because the proposed claims were unexhausted and could not support federal habeas relief at that point.
Disposition
The court denied Tineo-Santos’s motion to stay and hold the habeas proceeding in abeyance. It also denied his motion to amend the habeas petition. The Clerk was directed to close and mark Docket No. 25 as denied. The order did not decide the merits of the proposed ineffective-assistance claims and did not dismiss the pending habeas petition. The court also gave Tineo-Santos until February 19, 2021, to submit reply papers responding to the opposition to his original petition.
Read the full 17-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.