Case Information
*1 Before: GIBBONS and KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judges; DOW, District Judge. [*] _________________
COUNSEL ON BRIEF: Segev Phillips, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellant. Raina I. Korbakis, OFFICE OF THE MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellee.
_________________
OPINION
_________________
KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. In this case we review the district court’s dismissal of a habeas petition on essentially failure-to-prosecute grounds. Delphon Calhoun is a Michigan state prisoner who filed a federal habeas petition in 2003. Although the petition included only exhausted claims, Calhoun sought to litigate some unexhausted claims as well. He thus moved to stay his petition while he exhausted the additional claims in state court. The district court granted the stay on two conditions: first, that Calhoun file his additional claims in state court within 90 days of the stay order; and second, that he return to federal court within 30 days of exhausting them. See Palmer v. Carlton , 276 F.3d 777, 781 (6th Cir. 2002) (approving this procedure).
Calhoun disregarded the first condition. Rather than file his unexhausted claims within
90 days, he waited more than six years—until October 2010—to file them in Michigan state
court. The Michigan trial and appellate courts denied relief. In August 2012, Calhoun returned
to the district court and filed an amended petition that included his old claims from the initial
petition and his newly (but tardily) exhausted claims. In an October 2012 opinion, the district
court observed that Calhoun had “clearly failed to comply with the conditions of the stay.” Thus,
citing , the district court vacated its stay as of the date it had been entered and
“dismiss[ed]” Calhoun’s original petition. The court also dismissed Calhoun’s amended petition
as untimely. We review the dismissals de novo.
Hall v. Warden
,
We address first a procedural irregularity: though the district court purported to dismiss
two petitions in its October 2012 order, it only needed to dismiss one. “An amended complaint
supersedes an earlier complaint for all purposes.”
In re Refrigerant Compressors Antitrust
Litigation
, 731 F.3d 586, 589 (6th Cir. 2013);
see also Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. Linkline
Commc’ns, Inc.
,
That clarification disposes of Calhoun’s first argument on appeal, which is that the district court should have adjudicated his initial petition—even in 2012, nine years after it was filed—because it contained only exhausted claims and was timely filed. That petition was “supersede[d]” once Calhoun filed his amended one, In re Refrigerant Compressors , 731 F.3d at 589; and thus it was not pending for the district court to adjudicate.
Calhoun’s second argument is that the district court should have equitably tolled the limitations period for his amended petition. To answer that argument on its terms: Calhoun’s generalized, conclusory assertions about the difficulties of litigating from prison—difficulties that by definition virtually every habeas petitioner faces—fall well short of the proofs necessary for equitable tolling.
But the amended petition’s timeliness—in a limitations sense—is ultimately beside the
point. The district court dismissed Calhoun’s amended petition based upon our opinion in
Palmer.
And
Palmer
dismissal is not limitations dismissal, but dismissal for failure to comply
with the conditions of the court’s stay.
Palmer
,
Finally, Calhoun argues that the district court should have “transferred” his amended
petition to our court as a second or successive petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3). As shown
above, however, Calhoun himself superseded his initial petition when he filed his amended one.
The initial petition therefore did not count as a first petition for purposes of § 2244(b)(3).
See
Johnson v. United States
,
The district court’s judgment is affirmed.
Notes
[*] The Honorable Robert M. Dow Jr., United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation. 1