[18-6943] Banister v. Davis

Banister v. Davis

Justia (with opinion) · Docket · oyez.org

Argued on Dec 4, 2019.
Decided on Jun 1, 2020.

Petitioner: Gregory Dean Banister.
Respondent: Lorie Davis, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division.

Advocates:

• Brian T. Burgess (for the petitioner)
• Kyle D. Hawkins (for the respondent)
• Benjamin W. Snyder (Assistant to the Solicitor General, Department of Justice, for the United States, as amicus curiae, supporting the respondent)

Facts of the case (from oyez.org)

Gregory Dean Banister was convicted by a jury of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. He filed a habeas petition asserting numerous constitutional violations, which the district court denied on the merits on May 15, 2017. He also requested a certificate of appealability (COA), which the district court also denied in the same order.

On June 12, 2017, Banister filed a motion to “amend or alter” the judgment of the district court pursuant to Rule 59(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which the court denied on the merits on June 20, 2017.

On July 20, 2017, Banister filed a notice of appeal and an application for a COA, which the district court “considered” despite its previous order denying the COA, but again denied on July 28, 2017. Banister then sought and received from the Fifth Circuit an extension of time to file a COA application. He filed a petition for a COA with the Fifth Circuit on October 11, 2017, and the court denied his petition, citing lack of jurisdiction, on May 8, 2018. The Fifth Circuit held that Banister’s purported 59(e) motion was, in fact, a successive habeas petition, which would not toll the time for filing a notice of appeal. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzalez v. Crosby, 545 U.S. 524 (2005), the Fifth Circuit noted that “alleging that the court erred in denying habeas relief on the merits is effectively indistinguishable from alleging that the movant is, under the substantive provisions of the statutes, entitled to habeas relief.”

Question

Under what circumstances should a timely Rule 59(e) motion be recharacterized as a successive habeas petition?

Conclusion

A Rule 59(e) motion to alter or amend a habeas court’s judgment is not a second or successive habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b), so Banister’s appeal was timely. Justice Elena Kagan authored the opinion for the 7-2 majority.

To determine what “second or successive application” means, the Court first turned to historical habeas doctrine and practice and the purposes of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which governs federal habeas proceedings. In Browder v. Director, Department of Corrections of Illinois, 434 U.S. 257 (YYYY), decided before AEDPA, the Court held that Rule 59(e) applied in habeas proceedings. Although the language of the rule has since changed, those changes did not narrow the scope of that rule. In the fifty years since the adoption of the Federal Rules, only once has a court dismissed a Rule 59(e) motion as impermissibly successive, resolving all other cases on the merits. When Congress passed AEDPA, it gave no indication it intended to change this understood meaning of a successive application, nor do its purposes suggest such a change in meaning.

The Court pointed out that its decision in Gonzalez v. Crosby, 545 U.S. 524 (2005), applied to Rule 60(b) and that Rule 60(b) is substantially different from Rule 59(e) in critical ways. While Rule 60(b) is a means of attacking a habeas court’s judgment, a Rule 59(e) motion is a one-time effort to point out alleged errors in a just-issued decision before taking a single appeal.

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Clarence Thomas joined, arguing that because a Rule 59(e) motion asserts a habeas claim, it must be viewed as a “second or successive habeas petition” and be treated as such.