Richard Boyde v. Jill Brown, Warden

ORDER

1. We grant the petition for rehearing and amend the opinion filed April 21, 2005, as provided herein.

2. On May 24, 2005, we received a letter from the district judge who presided over Boyde’s federal habeas proceeding “bring[ing] to the Court’s attention a ‘mistake in [the] disposition.’ ” Letter from the district judge to the clerk of the court of appeals (May 24, 2005) (quoting Ninth Circuit General Order No. 12.10) (second alteration in original). In his letter, the district judge informed us that we had erred in not remanding this case to the district court for an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Boyde had been prejudiced by his attorney’s failure to introduce evidence that Boyde suffered physical abuse as a child and was aware that his sisters had been sexually abused. On May 25, the day after we received the district judge’s letter, the mandate in this case issued due to a clerical error.

The district judge’s letter was unusual, given that respondent, in the nearly five weeks following the filing of the opinion in this case, had not filed a timely petition for rehearing — the usual process by which mistakes in our opinions are corrected. One week after…