Jeremiah Banks v. Christopher Pierce, Warden

In early 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeremiah Banks—a prisoner with an eighth-grade education who had no appointed counsel—filed a “mixed” federal habeas petition and a request for stay-and-abeyance pursuant to Rhines v. Weber, 544 U.S. 269 (2005). The District Court denied Banks’s stay request and dismissed his petition. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, holding that Banks had not satisfied Rhines’s first requirement—good cause for failure to previously exhaust his claims—because he delayed in exhausting his claims for fifteen months after filing his federal petition. In effect, the Ninth Circuit held that to show good cause and procure a Rhines stay, a habeas petitioner such as Banks has a continuing obligation after he files his federal petition to explain why he has not yet exhausted state remedies. This requirement appears nowhere in Rhines. To the contrary, the plain text, reasoning, and context of Rhines all instruct that the good cause inquiry concerns events before the filing of a federal habeas petition; post-filing developments are irrelevant. The question presented is thus: did the Ninth Circuit’s denial of a stay so clearly misapply Rhines’s good cause standard as to call for reversal?