644
Opinion of the Court
respondent was not required to get authorization to file a "second or successive" application before his Ford claim could be heard.
If petitioners' interpretation of "second or successive" were correct, the implications for habeas practice would be far reaching and seemingly perverse. In Picard v. Connor, 404 U. S. 270, 275 (1971), we said:
"It has been settled since Ex parte Royall, 117 U. S. 241 (1886), that a state prisoner must normally exhaust available state judicial remedies before a federal court will entertain his petition for habeas corpus. . . . The exhaustion-of-state-remedies doctrine, now codified in the federal habeas statute, 28 U. S. C. §§ 2254(b) and (c), reflects a policy of federal-state comity. . . . It follows, of course, that once the federal claim has been fairly presented to the state courts, the exhaustion requirement is satisfied."
Later, in Rose v. Lundy, 455 U. S. 509, 522 (1982), we went further and held that "a district court must dismiss habeas petitions containing both unexhausted and exhausted claims." But none of our cases expounding this doctrine have ever suggested that a prisoner whose habeas petition was dismissed for failure to exhaust state remedies, and who then did exhaust those remedies and returned to federal court, was by such action filing a successive petition. A court where such a petition was filed could adjudicate these claims under the same standard as would govern those made in any other first petition.
We believe that respondent's Ford claim here—previously dismissed as premature—should be treated in the same manner as the claim of a petitioner who returns to a federal habeas court after exhausting state remedies. True, the cases are not identical; respondent's Ford claim was dismissed as premature, not because he had not exhausted state remedies, but because his execution was not imminent and therefore
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