recognizing that “[s]taying a federal habeas petition frustrates AEDPA’s objective of encouraging finality by allowing a petitioner to delay the resolution of the federal proceedings” and that it “undermines AEDPA’s goal of streamlining federal habeas proceedings by decreasing a petitioner’s incentive to exhaust all his claims in state court prior to filing his federal petition”
How later courts described this case
- recognizing that “[s]taying a federal habeas petition frustrates AEDPA’s objective of encouraging finality by allowing a petitioner to delay the resolution of the federal proceedings” and that it “undermines AEDPA’s goal of streamlining federal habeas proceedings by decreasing a petitioner’s incentive to exhaust all his claims in state court prior to filing his federal petition”
- stating that “stay and abeyance is only appropriate when the district 27 court determines there was good cause for the petitioner’s failure to exhaust his claims first in state court. [And] even if a petitioner [shows good cause], the district court would abuse its 28 discretion if it wereto grant him a stay when his unexhausted claims are plainly meritless.”
- stating that “stay and abeyance is only appropriate when the district court determines there was good cause for the petitioner’s failure to exhaust his claims first in 23 state court. [And] even if a petitioner [shows good cause], the district court would abuse its discretion if it were to grant him a stay when his unexhausted claims are plainly meritless.”
- holding that district courts may employ a “stay-and-abeyance” procedure *1215 in “limited circumstances” where there is good cause for the petitioner’s failure to first exhaust all of his claims in state court, the unexhausted claims are not plainly meritless, and there is no indication that the petitioner engaged in deliberately dilatory tactics
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Stevens,
with whom Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer join, concurring.
While I join the Court’s opinion, I do so on the understanding that its reference to “good cause” for failing to exhaust state remedies more promptly, ante, at 277, is not intended to impose the sort of strict and inflexible requirement that would “ ‘trap the unwary pro se prisoner.’ ” Rose v. Lundy, 455 U. S. 509, 520 (1982); see also Slack v. McDaniel, 529 U. S. 473, 487 (2000).
Justice Souter,
with whom Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer join, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join the Court’s opinion with one reservation, not doctrinal but practical. Instead of conditioning stay-and-abeyance on “good cause” for delay, ante, at 277, I would simply hold the order unavailable on a demonstration of “intentionally dilatory litigation tactics,” ante, at 278. 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.