The U. S. Supreme Court will hear argument on Monday to consider a Texas child molester’s claim that a federal law prohibiting successive petitions challenging convictions and sentences has been misinterpreted to deny him his rights. In 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which limited most defendants to one federal habeas corpus petition to challenge a conviction or sentence. Attorneys representing Danny Rivers assert that, when Congress passed AEDPA, it intended that a defendant could amend his petition four years after it was rejected by a judge and while the case is on appeal before an appellate court.

The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF) has joined the case, Rivers v. Guerrero, to oppose Rivers’ claim, arguing that after a district judge has rejected his petition, federal law allows a defendant to ask the district judge to reconsider his ruling within 28 days or appeal the ruling within 30 days. If the judge agrees to reconsider, the defendant can amend his petition and the 30-day requirement for an appeal is stayed. After the judge issues a second ruling, the 30-day clock for an appeal starts again. A request to reconsider in order to make new claims four years later is subject to Congress’s limit on repeated petitions.

In 2012, Rivers was convicted of the continuous sexual abuse of his daughter and his stepdaughter between 2005 and 2009. They testified that he began molesting them when they were nine years old. After listening to the girls describe what Rivers did to them hundreds of times over four years, the jury sentenced him to 38 years in prison. Rivers admitted to the sexual abuse of the girls to the three experienced, privately-paid attorneys representing him, according to the attorneys’ post-trial sworn testimony. One of his attorneys testified that he said that the girls “wanted it.”

Following his conviction and state appeals, Rivers filed a petition in federal District Court on habeas corpus claiming, among other things, that his trial attorneys were incompetent. The District Court rejected the claims and Rivers appealed that rejection to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals which also rejected his claims. Rivers then went back to the District Court to ask to amend his petition with a new claim, but that court determined that it lacked jurisdiction and transferred the petition to the Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit rejected it as a successive petition prohibited by AEDPA.

Because three of the twelve federal circuits have allowed defendants to amend some or all of their claims years later, the Supreme Court accepted Rivers v. Guerrero to settle the conflict.

In a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger argues that two earlier Supreme Court decisions laid out when and how a defendant can amend his petition and that Rivers’ claims do not qualify. There is an exception in cases where there is clear evidence of innocence, but Rivers does not meet that standard. If Rivers were to win a decision favoring his position, it would open the door for thousands of other convicted criminals to submit late claims years after earlier rulings rejected their petitions. The finality of justice sought by Congress 29 years ago when it passed AEDPA would be decimated.

“In this case, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to end any confusion regarding how many times the federal courts must hear repeated claims from guilty criminals,” said Scheidegger.