Tony Eugene Saffold v. Thomas L. Carey

The Supreme Court having vacated the opinion of this court in Saffold v. Newland, 250 F.3d 1262 (9th Cir.2001), and remanded, we must decide whether the California Supreme Court’s order denying Appellant’s habeas corpus petition both “on the merits and for lack of diligence” means that his petition before that court was untimely and therefore ineligible for tolling with respect to the one-year statute of limitations for state prisoners seeking ha-beas relief in federal court.

I

In 1990, a California state court found Tony Eugene Saffold guilty of murder, assault with a firearm, and two counts of robbery. Saffold’s conviction was affirmed on direct review and became final on April 20,1992.

Four years and four days later, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pub.L. No. 104 132, 110 Stat. 1214 (“AEDPA”), which imposed a one-year statute of limitations for state prisoners seeking habeas relief in federal courts. For prisoners whose convictions became final before the AEDPA’s passage — as Saffold’s did — the one-year statute of limitations began to run on the effective date of the act, April 24, 1996. The statute, however, contains a tolling…