Degree v. Corey
- Cathy Seibel
- 7:21-cv-11012
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 11
In Degree v. Corey, Judge McCarthy denied requests to amend and stay the federal habeas petition.
Dontae Degree’s federal habeas case was affected: his requests to add appellate-counsel claims and pause the case were denied, while the order did not resolve the merits of his existing four claims.
What happened
In Degree v. Corey, Dontae Degree, representing himself, asked the court to add claims that his appellate lawyer was ineffective and to pause his federal challenge to his state conviction while he pursued those claims in state court.
The court denied leave to amend because the proposed claims were filed after the applicable one-year deadline and did not relate back to the claims in Degree’s original petition. The court also denied a stay because the petition contained only exhausted claims, Degree did not show a sufficient reason for the delay, and the proposed claims were plainly barred by the filing deadline.
Judge McCarthy denied both the request to amend and the request to stay. The order did not decide the merits of Degree’s four existing challenges to his conviction.
The detailed version
- Degree v. Corey · No. 7:21-cv-11012
- Cathy Seibel
- June 13, 2023
Background
Dontae Degree filed a federal petition challenging his New York state-court conviction after a jury trial. The petition raised four claims: insufficient evidence, improper handling of alleged juror misconduct, improper limits on cross-examination, and ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Degree represented himself in this federal proceeding.
Degree asked the court to add several claims alleging ineffective assistance of appellate counsel, which he had raised in a state application for a writ of error coram nobis. He also asked the court to stay, or pause, the federal petition while the state application was pending. Respondent Joseph Corey opposed the request.
Motion to Amend
The court denied Degree’s motion to amend. It found that the proposed appellate-counsel claims were filed after the one-year limitations period under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act had expired. The court calculated that period as beginning on December 8, 2020, when the New York Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal, and ending on December 8, 2021. Degree filed the state coram nobis application on July 7, 2022.
The court considered whether the proposed claims could nevertheless be added under the relation-back rule. That rule allows a late-added claim only when it arises from the same conduct, transaction, or occurrence as a timely original claim. The court concluded that Degree’s original claims concerned events during his trial, while the proposed claims concerned the performance of a different lawyer during the appeal. The proposed claims therefore did not relate back, and the motion to amend was denied.
Motion to Stay
The court also denied the motion to stay. A stay and abeyance is available for a habeas petition containing both claims already presented to the state courts and claims that have not yet been presented there. The court found that all four claims in Degree’s federal petition had been presented to the state courts, so the petition was not a mixed petition.
The court further held that Degree had not shown good cause for waiting to raise his appellate-counsel claims. It also found that those claims were plainly meritless for purposes of the stay request because they were time-barred and did not relate back to the original petition. Although the court found no indication that Degree had intentionally delayed the litigation, it explained that this did not overcome the other defects.
Disposition and Scope
The court’s conclusion states that Degree’s applications for a stay and for leave to amend the petition are denied. The order addressed those procedural requests; it did not decide the merits of the four claims in Degree’s existing habeas petition.
Read the full 11-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.