Daniels v. State of NY
- Laura Swain
- 1:23-cv-00655
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Daniels v. State of New York, Judge Swain gave Daniels 45 days to withdraw his appeal before the district court could reopen his case.
Shatrek Daniels and the status of his petition in the district court; the order also concerns his pending appeal in the Second Circuit.
What happened
Daniels had filed a petition challenging his custody but had not paid the $5 filing fee or submitted an application to proceed without paying it. The court had dismissed the case without prejudice for that failure, and Daniels later submitted both a notice of appeal and an application to proceed without paying.
The court explained that filing the appeal transferred control over the disputed parts of the case to the appeals court. Because of that appeal, the district court could not reopen the case immediately based on Daniels’s application.
The court granted Daniels 45 days to withdraw his appeal in the Second Circuit and notify the district court. If he does so and the district court regains authority to act, it will reopen the case based on his application. Judge Laura Taylor Swain issued the order.
The detailed version
- Daniels v. State of NY · No. 1:23-cv-00655
- Laura Swain
- June 28, 2023
Background
The court had previously dismissed Daniels’s action without prejudice because he did not comply with an order requiring him either to pay the $5 filing fee for a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 or to submit an application to proceed without paying the fee. After that dismissal, Daniels submitted a notice of appeal dated April 11, 2023, and an application to proceed without paying the fee dated April 13, 2023.
Because Daniels was in custody, the court applied the prisoner-mailbox rule, which treats a prisoner’s filing as submitted when it is delivered to prison officials for mailing. The court assumed that Daniels delivered the documents for mailing on the dates written on them.
Jurisdiction and Conditional Reopening
The court stated that filing a notice of appeal transfers authority over the parts of the case involved in the appeal to the appeals court and removes the district court’s control over those matters. Therefore, the district court could not reopen the case while Daniels’s appeal from the dismissal was pending, even though he had submitted the fee-waiver application.
Order
The court granted Daniels 45 days from the date of the order to withdraw his appeal pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and notify the district court that he had done so. If Daniels withdraws the appeal and the district court regains authority to act, the court will reopen the case based on his application to proceed without paying the filing fee. The court stated that, after reopening, it will screen the petition under the applicable rules governing petitions under § 2254 and take appropriate action. The order did not decide the merits of Daniels’s custody challenge. Judge Laura Taylor Swain signed the order.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.