On appeal from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Unfortunately for him, Alabama's rule at the time was that this sort of post-conviction appeal had to occur 2 years after the date he was convicted. This means that even though the Supreme Court denied his appeal in November 1990, he actually had to file the appeal in May 1992 - two years from the conviction date. (The current rule is one year from the conviction date.)
When he appealed, the State told him the equivalent of "no dice" - Siebert was late and Alabama doesn't consider the post-conviction relief requests of late filed petitions. (That'll learn 'im.) By September 15, 2000, Mr. Siebert had exhausted his appeals in Alabama.
So what to do? Well - the next step is to appeal to federal district court using federal habeas corpus procedures. But there was a catch - the federal courts have a statute of limitation as well. In this instance, that limitation (imposed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which has nothing to do with terrorists or the death penalty) was over on April 24, 1997, unless the statute tolled (extended the time that the litigant has to file).
In September 2001, when Siebert asked the Federal District Court in Alabama, "For whom does the statute toll?" The district court decided, "It does not toll for thee." Mr. Siebert appealed, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. The Court of Appeals decided that the statute "tolls for thee" and remanded to the District Court to address the merits of Mr. Siebert's petition.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court decided another habeas corpus case, Pace v. DiGuglielmo, 544 U.S. 408 (2005). In that case, the Supreme Court explained tolling when a prisoner has belatedly filed a review for post-conviction in the state courts. The Supreme Court held the statute of limitations for the federal action does not toll when a prisoner hadn't timely filed for post-conviction relief in state court.
If the facts in Pace seem familiar - they should. That's very nearly exactly the facts in this case. Predictably, the District Court read Pace and decided that, because Siebert didn't file his petition in the State Courts in a timely manner, he lost his opportunity to pursue his federal petition to get out of jail (or not die by lethal injection, or whatever).
At this point, it looks like Siebert is out of luck. But, no - the Eleventh Circuit ruled, for the second time on the case, that Siebert could get the merits of his petition reviewed by the District Court.
This time, the Supreme Court took the case on appeal from the Eleventh Circuit.
This is a death penalty appeal - there are more appeal dates than you can shake a stick at. This particular appeal has gone on for over 17 years - which is not unusual. The problem, of course, is that appeals like this one take so long. State and federal legislatures have been making a concerted effort in the last 20 years to reduce the amount of time that the appeals take. These efforts include time limits on how long the convicted prisoner can wait to file the appeal, and how often the appeals may be filed.
So, how long did Siebert have to appeal? There are a number of time limits that are imposed on when prisioners can file appeals- one time limit for the first appeal, one time limit for the state habeus appeal, one time limit for the federal appeal. In this instance, Siebert had a timely first appeal. He missed the deadline for his second appeal in the state courts. The Supreme Court here essentially found that while he was waiting for the state courts to decide that he hadn't filed his state appeal on time, he needed to file a federal appeal.
The way the federal statute is written, only "properly filed" petitions in state courts allow to prisoners to extend the statute of limitations during their appeals. What Pace decided was that late filed appeals are never really "properly filed". Pace also explained why this should be the rule: otherwise prisoners can file their petition late in the state courts and the federal courts would be able to take up the merits even though the prisoner avoided the state statute of limitations. That is inconsistent with the goal of the federal statute of limitations.
So, when essentially deciding the same case a second time, the per curiam Supreme Court is a little grumpy: "Under the Court of Appeals’ approach, federal habeas courts would have to delve into the intricacies of state procedural law in deciding whether a postconviction petition rejected by the state courts as untimely was nonetheless 'properly filed' under §2244(d)(2)."
In this instance, the difference is that the statute of limitations in Alabama is an affirmative defense. The dissent believes that this distinction leads to a different result than Pace because the statute of limitations in that case was not an affirmative defense.
Justice Stevens doesn't really explain the distinction here, but he and Justice Ginsberg obviously disagree with the per curium Court. (Which is odd - if everone agrees enough to not even bother assigning one of the majority Justices to write the opinion, why are two Justices dissenting?)
The difference is that an affirmative defense requires the defendant (in this instance, the State of Alabama) to prove the merit of the defense before a court will give the defendant the benefit of the defense. What the appeals court had said was that it wanted the district court to consider all the issues, because Pace wasn't about a statute like Alabama's which is an affirmative defense, and wasn't similar enough to have the district court dismiss the petition after the appeals court had already decided that it was properly filed.
Siebert has a feeding tube, suffers from chronic nausea and tumor-related pain, and has been losing weight. Dr. Jimmie H. Harvey, Jr., a board-certified medical oncologist, reviewed Siebert's medical records and opined, among other things, that Siebert's life expectancy is less than 90 days and that there is a "great likelihood" that Siebert would regurgitate stomach content when administered the current three-drug protocol and aspi-rate prior to death. Moreover, Dr. Harvey stressed, in this regard, Siebert's malignancy and the physiology of his upper GI tract at this particular time. Because Siebert is "cachectic," which . . . means "having physical wasting with loss of weight and muscle mass due to disease," Dr. Harvey also noted that Siebert will have "very compromised venous access" due to his particular serious medical conditions. Additionally, Dr. Harvey reported that due to "the inevitable death related to this malignancy, Mr. Siebert has elected to receive no palliative chemotherapy or radiation therapy."
Likely, Siebert going to die in a slow and probabbly not unpainful way even if Alabama doesn't have the opportunity to administer the lethal injection.