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Opinion of the Court
the petition without prejudice. A death warrant was issued for the week of June 23, 1995.
Stage Four: Brother's "Next Friend" Habeas: June 20- June 23, 1995. Three days before the scheduled execution, Lonchar's brother, Milan, filed another "next friend" habeas petition in state court. Lonchar again opposed it. Within three days, Milan's petition met the same fate as his sister's earlier petition. That is to say, federal and state courts, at trial and appellate levels, all found Lonchar competent and denied the petition.
Stage Five: Lonchar's Current Habeas: June 23, 1995- Present. Immediately thereafter, after discussions with his lawyers, Lonchar filed another state habeas petition containing 22 claims, including one that challenged the method of execution. He told the state-court judge that he wished to pursue each of the 22 claims, but was litigating them only to delay his execution, with the hope that the State would change the execution method to lethal injection so he could donate his organs. The state courts stayed the execution briefly, and then, two days later, denied the petition. Lonchar immediately filed his first federal habeas petition, which set forth the same 22 claims.
The State asked that Lonchar's federal petition be dismissed, stressing what it called Lonchar's "inequitable conduct" in waiting almost six years, and until the last minute, to file a federal habeas petition. The District Court held that this could not constitute an independent basis for rejecting the petition. In its view, Habeas Corpus Rule 9, not some generalized equitable authority to dismiss, governed the case. And, it held, Rule 9's authority to dismiss for "abuse of the writ" applied to "second or successive" habeas petitions, not to a first petition, such as Lonchar's. See Habeas Corpus Rule 9(b) ("A second or successive petition may be dismissed if . . . the judge finds that the failure of the petitioner to assert those grounds in a prior petition constituted an abuse of the writ") (emphasis added). The District
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