Chang v. Minnesota, Minn.Ct.App., 2/16/2010. Mr. Chang is serving a fourteen year or so stretch up at the Moose Lake prison. Without benefit of counsel he petitioned for post conviction relief. On July 31, 2007, Mr. Chang put his petition into the prison mailbox, but the clerk’s office did not receive it until eight days later.
Mr. Chang’s conviction preceded the enactment of a two year limitations period for filing a post conviction petition. So, he had two years from the effective date of this enactment, or July 31, 2007, to file his petition. This limitations provision says that:
No petition for postconviction relief may be filed more than two years after the later of:
The district court read this statute and threw out Mr. Chang’s petition, concluding that “filing” required actual receipt in the clerk’s office; the court rejected the “prison mailbox rule” utilized in federal court for inmate pro se litigation. See Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266 (1988).
The harshness of this rejection of a “prison mailbox rule” requires a close look at the Houston, opinion. Mr. Houston had lost a federal habeas petition and wanted to appeal. The applicable court rule said that he had to file his notice of appeal within thirty days of the denial of his petition. On the twenty-seventh day he deposited his notice of appeal with the prison authorities for mailing but the notice did not arrive until after expiration of the thirty days. In re-affirming the “prison mailbox rule” here’s what the Supreme Court had to say:
The situation of prisoners seeking to appeal without the aid of counsel is unique. Such prisoners cannot take the steps other litigants can take to monitor the processing of their notices of appeal and to ensure that the court clerk receives and stamps their notices of appeal before the 30-day deadline. Unlike other litigants, pro se prisoners cannot personally travel to the courthouse to see that the notice is stamped “filed” or to establish the date on which the court received the notice. Other litigants may choose to entrust their appeals to the vagaries of the mail and the clerk's process for stamping incoming papers, but only the pro se prisoner is forced to do so by his situation. And if other litigants do choose to use the mail, they can at least place the notice directly into the hands of the United States Postal Service (or a private express carrier); and they can follow its progress by calling the court to determine whether the notice has been received and stamped, knowing that if the mail goes awry they can personally deliver notice at the last moment or that their monitoring will provide them with evidence to demonstrate either excusable neglect or that the notice was not stamped on the date the court received it. Pro se prisoners cannot take any of these precautions; nor, by definition, do they have lawyers who can take these precautions for them. Worse, the pro se prisoner has no choice but to entrust the forwarding of his notice of appeal to prison authorities whom he cannot control or supervise and who may have every incentive to delay. No matter how far in advance the pro se prisoner delivers his notice to the prison authorities, he can never be sure that it will ultimately get stamped “filed” on time. And if there is a delay the prisoner suspects is attributable to the prison authorities, he is unlikely to have any means of proving it, for his confinement prevents him from monitoring the process sufficiently to distinguish delay on the part of prison authorities from slow mail service or the court clerk's failure to stamp the notice on the date received. Unskilled in law, unaided by counsel, and unable to leave the prison, his control over the processing of his notice necessarily ceases as soon as he hands it over to the only public officials to whom he has access-the prison authorities-and the only information he will likely have is the date he delivered the notice to those prison authorities and the date ultimately stamped on his notice.
The appellate court rejects the mailbox rule by adopting dicta from a 1967 opinion, State v. Parker, 278 Minn. 53, 153 N.W.2d 264 (1967). Mr. Parker mailed his notice of appeal on the last day of the appeal period; the appellate court accepted the appeal despite a statute that said that the notice had to be filed with the court clerk.
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