Rufus Earl Davis v. Walter Dunbar, Director, California Department of Correction

The appellant is a California state prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence of confinement for a period of six months to ten years. The sentence followed his final conviction, in the California courts, of the offense of assault with a deadly weapon. Cal.Pen.Code § 245. After certain unsuccessful post-conviction proceedings in the state courts, Davis filed his petition for habeas ^corpus in the court below. The court denied the petition without having conducted an evi-dentiary hearing, and Davis appeals.

The petition set forth contentions which had been rejected in post-convic-. tion proceedings in the state courts. It also presented two new claims. In the first of these, appellant contended that since the information charged him only with assault with intent to commit murder under Cal.Pen.Code § 217 and assault with intent to commit rape under Cal. Pen.Code § 220, it was insufficient to support conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. In the second, he contended that he had-been deprived of the effective assistance of competent counsel in his appeal to the California appellate courts.

Insofar as the petition in the court below was based upon the two contentions not…