Rhines, Charles v. Weber, Douglas (Warden) (03/30/2005)

Questions presented: (1) Can a federal court stay a section 2254 habeas corpus petition which includes exhausted and unexhausted claims, when the stay is necessary to permit a petitioner to exhaust claims in state court without having the one-year statute of limitations in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) bar the right to a federal petition? (2) Is the 8th Circuit correct that the dismissal of a mixed section 2254 petition is mandated by Rose v. Lundy, or are the appeals courts for the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th and 9th circuits correct in following the separate concurrences of Justices Souter and Stevens in Duncan v. Walker that a stay of an otherwise timely-filed federal petition is permissible in light of the AEDPA?

BY ROBEN KANTOR, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

On June 19, 1992, at 12:45 p.m., police arrested Charles Russell Rhines for a burglary in King County, Washington. When Officer Michael Caldwell read him his rights, Rhines responded to the effect of, "Those two detectives from South Dakota are here, aren’t they?"

Six hours later in a King County police station, two South Dakota officers, Detective Steve Allender and Deputy Sheriff Don Bahr, questioned Rhines about a March 8 murder and burglary at Dig ‘Em Donuts Shop, where Rhines worked as a baker until he got fired in February.

More than three months had passed since an employee’s body was found in the back storeroom of the Rapid City doughnut shop. Donnivan Schaffer’s hands were bound, and he had been stabbed in the abdomen, back and neck. Approximately $3,300 in cash, coins and checks was missing from the store.

Rhines confessed to the murder and the burglary. Two hours later, he let the detectives tape-record his incriminating statements. Two day later, when Allender and Bahr questioned him again, Rhines also agreed to the tape recording. Allender said he reminded Rhines of his rights.

According to Rhines’ confession, Schaeffer caught him robbing the doughnut shop so he stabbed Schaeffer in the abdomen and upper back, piercing his left lung. Rhines then dragged Schaffer into the storeroom, where he plunged his knife into Schaeffer’s skull. Schaeffer most likely died instantly.

After he was indicted a month later in Pennington County, South Dakota, Rhines filed a pretrial motion to suppress his confessions. He argued that the Miranda rights Allender read him were not clear. The trial court denied Rhines’ petition, saying Miranda rights need to be conceptually, not literally, verbatim.

On Jan. 22, 1993, a jury found Rhines guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and third-degree burglary. Four days later, the same jury sentenced Rhines to death by lethal injection.

South Dakota law requires a jury to find only one aggravating circumstance before considering the death penalty—Rhines’ jury found four, including torture, intent to avoid arrest, financial gain and depravity of mind.

Rhines appealed his conviction and sentence to the South Dakota Supreme Court, contesting, for example, the admissibility of his confessions and impact testimony from the victim’s mother as evidence. Rhines also argued that he illegally received the death penalty because his jury was prejudiced against his homosexuality, and his sentence was excessive when compared to other homicide cases in South Dakota.

More than three years later, in May 1996, a 3-2 majority of the state Supreme Court ruled that the "depravity of mind" definition in South Dakota’s death penalty statute was too broad, unconstitutional, and therefore invalid in Rhines’ case. However, the Court affirmed Rhines’ conviction and sentence on the three other factors.

Citing the 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Zant v. Stephens, Chief Justice Robert Miller wrote for the majority: "The Court held that the invalidity of one aggravating circumstance did not require reversal of the death sentence…We hold the invalidity of the ‘depravity of mind’ circumstance does not so taint the penalty proceedings as to mandate reversal of Rhines’ death sentence."

Justices Richard Sabers and Robert Amundson dissented, however. Calling Rhines’ death sentence excessive and disproportionate, Amundson wrote: "In South Dakota, only two people since 1979 have been sentenced to death out of at least 52 eligible criminals...This issue [of whether the death penalty is being imposed uniformly] cannot be resolved by only considering cases where capital sentencing proceedings were actually conducted."

After the South Dakota Supreme Court refused to overturn Rhines’ conviction and sentence on direct appeal, Rhines asked the nation’s highest court to review his case. The U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition.

Three days later, on Dec. 5, 1996, Rhines filed a petition in Pennington County that claimed, because trial mistakes deprived him of his basic constitutional rights, his imprisonment was unlawful and ought to be overturned.

Rhines argued that his legal counsel’s investigation and presentation of mitigating evidence was inadequate, and that the state Supreme Court did not conduct a sufficient review of his death sentence after invalidating an aggravating factor.

In October 1998, the state’s 7th Judicial Circuit Court refused to overturn Rhines’ sentence or grant him a new trial based on his claims of constitutional violations. In February 2000, the South Dakota Supreme Court affirmed, ruling that, under its two-prong test, Rhines failed to prove that his counsel’s assistance was inadequate.

Judge James W. Anderson, writing for the unanimous court, addressed the state court’s alleged insufficient review of Rhines’ death sentence: "This Court did not err by not undertaking a reweighing of aggravating and mitigating factors… [It] is not required in a non-weighing jurisdiction such as South Dakota."

Rhines then sought relief in federal court. His petition contained 35 claims of constitutional defects in his conviction and sentence.

Out of concern for the one-year time limit on filing federal challenges to state convictions, established in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rhines also filed a May 2000 "motion to toll time," or stop the clock, on his one-year time limit. Based on a recommendation from the state’s Attorney General’s office, the motion was denied as unnecessary—when Rhines came to federal court, only 8 to 14 days had run on his one-year time period.

On July 3, 2002, more than 16 months after Rhines filed his appeal, the district court ruled that Rhines had filed a mixed petition: some claims clearly had been presented and dismissed in state court, but eight others had not. In its 1982 Rose v. Lundy decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such petitions must be dismissed from federal court until the unexhausted claims are presented and dismissed in state court. This prevents federal courts from intruding into state court convictions unduly or prematurely.

However, Rhines’ one-year time limit expired in the time that the federal court had his petition pending. U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier put Rhines’ federal petition on hold, pending exhaustion of the state court claims within 60 days.

Rhines complied by filing his second state petition.

But the state challenged this two-pronged approach of seeking relief in both state and federal court. South Dakota asked the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Schreier’s decision, which it did on Oct. 7, 2003.

The 8th Circuit’s three-judge panel departed from other appeals courts around the country by ruling that Rose v. Lundy should be taken literally: if there are unexhausted claims, the entire petition ought to be dismissed and not just frozen. Rhines could then return to state court for a ruling on whether he could drop the unexhausted claims.

Citing its 2003 Akins v. Kenney decision, the brief, unsigned opinion stated, "Akins precludes the district court from staying Rhines’ exhausted claims while he seeks state post-conviction relief…However, Akins did not decide whether a petitioner may delete unexhausted claims."

Rhines appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. His Sioux Falls lawyer, Roberto Lange, wants Schreier’s ruling reinstated. He says the 8th Circuit’s decision runs counter to five other federal circuits, which have ruled that the one-year time limit for filing federal court challenges to state imprisonment does not run while state proceedings are pending.

If the 8th Circuit’s decision stands, however, Rhines will have to choose between the state and federal court systems for continuing his legal battles. If he drops his federal petition, Rhines cannot return because his statute of limitations will have expired.

On June 28, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case for review and allowed Rhiens to have his case proceed without court costs.

On March 30, 2005, the Court sided unanimously with Rhines in concluding that federal courts do have the power to stay a mixed petition so a prisoner can have his case heard in state court without jeopardizing his recourse to the federal courts.

Though the decision was unanimous, the Court issued three opinions on the matter.

In the lead opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted that although stays are allowed, they should be used gingerly, not extend indefinitely, and invoked when prisoners have good cause for failing to have exhausted their state remedies.

Justice John Paul Stevens added a one-sentence concurrence to indicate he understood the Court's reference to "good cause" for failing to exhaust state remedies more promptly ... is not intended to impose the sort of strict and inflexible requirement that would ‘trap the unwary pro se prisoner.’" Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with that.

Justice David Souter added a concurrence too, also for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, and only slightly longer, to note one practical reservation.

"Instead of conditioning stay-and-abeyance on 'good cause' for delay...I would simply hold the order unavailable on a demonstration of 'intentionally dilatory litigation tactics,'" Souter wrote. "The trickiness of some exhaustion determinations promises to infect issues of good cause when a court finds a failure to exhaust; pro se petitioners (as most habeas petitioners are) do not come well trained to address such matters. I fear that threshold enquiries into good cause will give the district courts too much trouble to be worth the time; far better to wait for the alarm to sound when there is some indication that a petitioner is gaming the system."