Weitzel v. State, Minn.Ct.App., 7/20/2015. Mr. Weitzel filed this petition for post conviction relief well after the expiration of the two year limitations period. He argued in his petition and accompanying memorandum that the "interests of justice" exception applied and that under it he was entitled to relief. The state filed a response which said "No, you're not." The state's response said nothing about the timeliness of the petition.
The post conviction court denied the petition. The court raised the limitations issue on its own and also addressed the merits of the petition under the "interests of justice" exception. The court said that Mr. Weitzel had not filed the petition within two years of the accrual of his claim, and that he had not satisfied the requirements of the interests of justice exception to the two year limitations period.
Enactment of a statute of limitations for filing post conviction petitions was supposed to reduce the litigation surrounding post convictions claims. Instead, all that's been accomplished is either to change the subject - is the petition time barred - or to add pages to opinions because of the need to address first the limitations question and then the merits of the petition. Both the court of appeals and the supreme court spend inordinate amounts of time parsing just how the limitations provisions are supposed to work.
For Mr. Weitzel, the court of appeals concludes that the state's silence about the timeliness of the petition did not amount to the intentional waiver of a defense of untimeliness. While the post conviction court should have given the parties a heads up of what it was considering doing - denying the petition as untimely - and allow them to stake out their positions it didn't really matter because the court went on to address the merits of the claim. In essence, the court of appeals gives an advisory opinion on the limitations question and affirms the denial of the petition under the "interests of justice" provision.
No comments:
Post a Comment