Abu-ali Abdur'rahman v. Ricky Bell, Warden (537 U.S. 88)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided December 10, 2002 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 537 U.S. 88 · 123 S. Ct. 594
- Decided
- December 10, 2002
- Term
- October Term 2002
- Vote
- 8–1
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Petition denied or appeal dismissed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Stevens, dissenting. The Court’s decision to dismiss the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted presumably is motivated, at least in part, by the view that the jurisdictional issues presented by this case do not admit of an easy resolution. 1 I do not share that view. Moreover, I believe we have an obligation to provide needed clarification concerning an important issue that has generated confusiori among the federal courts, namely, the availability of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) motions to challenge the integrity of final orders entered in ha-beas corpus proceedings. I therefore respectfully dissent from the Court’s disposition of the case. I In 1988 the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed petitioner’s conviction and his death sentence. His attempts to ob *90 tain postconviction relief in the state court system were unsuccessful. In 1996 he filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus in the Federal District Court advancing several constitutional claims, two of which raised difficult questions. The first challenged the competency of his trial counsel and the second made serious allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. After hearing extensive evidence on both claims, on April 8, 1998, the District Court entered an order granting relief on the first claim, but holding that the second was procedurally barred because it had not been fully exhausted in the…
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