WASHINGTON — Floyd Perkins, a Michigan man serving a life sentence for murder, says he has evidence proving his innocence and should be allowed to present it long after a one-year filing deadline has passed.
The Supreme Court has never resolved whether such deadlines may be waived when prisoners file federal habeas corpus challenges to state-court convictions based on evidence of innocence. Judging from the justices’ questionson Monday in Mr. Perkins’s case, their eventual decision is not likely to bring much additional clarity to the situation.
There was some support from the bench for the abstract proposition that deadlines ought not be too rigid. But there was less sympathy for Mr. Perkins himself.
Mr. Perkins was convicted based largely on the testimony of Damarr Jones, who said he saw Mr. Perkins stab a third man in the head in 1993 after the three of them left a house party in Flint, Mich. The third man, Rodney Henderson, was found dead on a wooded trail.
Mr. Perkins testified that he had parted from the other two men before the killing and later saw his accuser under a streetlight, bloody and agitated. The jury believed Mr. Jones.
Over the years, from behind bars, Mr. Perkins collected three sworn statements from people who said they had evidence that Mr. Jones was the actual killer. Their basic contention was that Mr. Jones had taken a bloody pair of orange pants to a dry cleaner the day after the killing.
Though Mr. Perkins obtained the last statement in 2002, he did not ask a federal judge to throw out his conviction until 2008. The judge refused, saying it had been filed too late and that, in any event, the statements were just an elaboration of a claim the jury had rejected — that Mr. Perkins “was being framed by the prosecution’s lead witness, who himself was responsible for the murder.”
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, reversed the part of the ruling concerning the deadline and ordered the trial judge to take another look at the evidence.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he had “some difficulty understanding what the Sixth Circuit was doing.”
“The most that is suggested by the affidavits is that Jones was a participant in this murder, not that Perkins was not responsible for the murder,” he said.
He added that Mr. Perkins should lose for two reasons.
“First, you don’t really have evidence of actual innocence,” Justice Alito said. “Second, you weren’t diligent.”
John J. Bursch, Michigan’s solicitor general, said it was unfair to make prosecutors respond to the new evidence after so much time had elapsed.
“We all know that as time passes evidence deteriorates, whether it’s because of death or illness or simply forgetfulness,” he said. “I certainly can’t remember what I was doing 10 years ago today.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked why Mr. Perkins had waited so long to go to court.
Chad A. Readler, Mr. Perkins’s lawyer, listed several reasons.
“One, he was looking for counsel to assist him,” Mr. Readler said of his client. “Two, he continued to look for evidence. Three, he didn’t have access to his legal papers. Many of his legal papers were lost in a prison riot.”
Mr. Bursch urged the justices not to credit that last reason. “Defendant Perkins incited the prison riot,” he said.
Justice Alito said there were practical reasons not to relax the deadline in the case, McQuiggin v. Perkins, No. 12-126.
“If you took a poll of all of the prisoners in Michigan, how many of them do you think would say they are actually innocent?” he asked. He answered his own question: “A lot.”
He added he thought it unlikely that Congress would have “intended to create an exemption that broad, so that anybody who claims to be actually innocent” could take advantage of it.
The court on Monday also declined to hear a case concerning racially charged remarks at trial by a federal prosecutor in Texas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an opinion joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, wrote that the decision not to hear the case, Calhoun v. United States, No. 12-6142, had been correct, as the defendant’s lawyer had not objected to the remarks.
She wrote separately, she said, to dispel any doubt about the Supreme Court’s tolerance of such comments.
A question in the case was whether the defendant, Bongani C. Calhoun, had been aware that his companions were planning to buy drugs. The prosecutor said the circumstances should have made that plain to Mr. Calhoun.
“You’ve got African-Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money,” he said. “Doesn’t that tell you — a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, ‘This is a drug deal’?”
Justice Sotomayor wrote that this statement “was pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence, and racial prejudice for reason.”
“I hope,” she wrote, “never to see a case like this again.”