Abuse of Discretion – Stay Denied

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Adam Yeoman v. William Pollard

Case No.: 15-3489

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and ROVNER and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Abuse of Discretion – Stay Denied

Adam Yeoman is serving a lengthy sentence in a Wisconsin prison after entering a plea of “no contest” to a charge of attempted first degree intentional homicide. Before filing his federal petition for habeas corpus relief, he exhausted some but not all of his claims in the Wisconsin courts. In presenting his mixed petition to the district court, Yeoman requested that the court enter a stay and hold his petition in abeyance so that he could return to state court and exhaust his remedies there. The court declined to enter the stay after concluding that Yeoman lacked good cause for the request. The court then dismissed the petition with prejudice, and Yeoman appeals. We affirm

Yeoman contends that a stay in his case does no harm to the goals of the AEDPA. Because he is not under a sentence of death, he has no incentive to delay execution of his sentence. On the contrary, he has every incentive to resolve his case as quickly as possible in order to overturn his conviction or shorten his term of imprisonment. Moreover, he asserts, the Supreme Court held in Pace v. DiGuglielmo, 544 U.S. 408, 416 (2005), that a “petitioner’s reasonable confusion about whether a state filing would be timely will ordinarily constitute ‘good cause’ for him to file in federal court.” But Yeoman’s first argument does not account for the AEDPA’s “interests of comity and federalism [which] dictate that state courts must have the first opportunity to decide a petitioner’s claims,” or the interest in finality, which does not apply exclusively to capital cases.

Moreover, Yeoman misreads the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Pace. Yeoman characterizes Pace as holding that a petitioner’s reasonable confusion about state filing deadlines will ordinarily constitute “good cause” for a stay. He asserts that his confusion about exhaustion requirements similarly provided good cause for seeking a stay, and that the court abused its discretion here in denying him a stay. Finally, Yeoman asserts that the denial of the stay and dismissal of his claims forever precludes habeas review of his unexhausted claims. But any unavailability of federal review would be due entirely to Yeoman’s failure to exhaust his claims in state court first. In short, there was no abuse of discretion in the district court’s decision to deny the stay on the ground that Yeoman lacked good cause for failing to exhaust his claims.

Affirmed

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.