Flores

MEMORANDUM *

In November of 1998, Jaime Flores pled guilty to conspiring to sell drugs and kid *599 naping. After holding a sentencing hearing and finding no mitigating circumstances, the court sentenced Flores to 16 years imprisonment, the maximum provided for in the plea agreement. Flores filed a timely state petition for post-conviction relief, which was denied without a hearing. The state appellate and supreme courts summarily dismissed his appeals of that denial. Flores then filed a habeas petition in federal district court. That petition was denied without an evidentiary hearing, and Flores now appeals that decision.

Flores seeks an evidentiary hearing on whether his counsel was ineffective for failing to present mitigating evidence of Flores’s history of mental health issues at his sentencing and for allowing Flores to plead guilty while heavily medicated and suffering various mental health problems. These basic claims were presented in Flores’s pro se state habeas petitions. In light of the liberal construction we must give to pro se habeas petitions and our reluctance to engage in hairsplitting regarding exhaustion, we conclude that the state petitions sufficiently…