Inmate is entitled to new lawyers after counsel blew habeas deadline by 117 days, SCOTUS says
A Missouri death-row inmate is entitled to the appointment of new counsel after his lawyers filed a habeas petition 117 days after the deadline, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.
The court’s per curiam opinion (PDF) on Tuesday summarily reversed a decision by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of inmate Mark Christeson, whose lawyers failed to even meet with him until more than six weeks after the habeas petition was due.
The decision named the lawyers–Phil Horwitz and Eric Butts—who said they had miscalculated the time for filing. Christeson has “severe cognitive disabilities” the Supreme Court said, and may not have been aware that the late-filed petition was dismissed as untimely.
Nearly seven years later, Horwitz and Butts consulted two other lawyers on how to proceed. The new lawyers “immediately noticed a glaring problem,” the Supreme Court said: Christeson’s only hope of obtaining habeas review was to file a petition seeking equitable tolling of the statute of limitations due to the alleged “malfeasance” of Horwitz and Butts. The new lawyers sought substitution of counsel, without success.
Because tolling is only available in cases of serious attorney misconduct, it posed a conflict of interest for Horwitz and Butts to continue to represent Christeson, and new counsel should have been appointed, the Supreme Court said. According to the Missouri bar, Butts practices law in St. Louis and Horwitz practices in Clayton.
Christeson was convicted of the murders of a woman and her two children in 1998; he was 18 at the time of the crime, the Associated Press reports.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. The 8th Circuit should not have been reversed without briefing and argument, Alito said. Facts in the present record “show nothing more than attorney error and thus fall short of establishing the kind of abandonment that is needed for equitable tolling under our precedent,” Alito said.
The case is Christeson v. Roper.
