10
Opinion of the Court
526 U. S. 838, 839-840 (1999) ("In this case, we are asked to decide whether a state prisoner must present his claims to a state supreme court in a petition for discretionary review in order to satisfy the exhaustion requirement" (emphases added)). Ignoring this distinction would require judges to engage in verbal gymnastics when an application contains some claims that are procedurally barred and some that are not. Presumably a court would have to say that the application is "properly filed" as to the nonbarred claims, and not "properly filed" as to the rest. The statute, however, refers only to "properly filed" applications and does not contain the peculiar suggestion that a single application can be both "properly filed" and not "properly filed." Ordinary English would refer to certain claims as having been properly presented or raised, irrespective of whether the application containing those claims was properly filed.
Petitioner's remaining arguments are beside the point. He argues, for example, that tolling for applications that raise procedurally barred claims does nothing to enable the exhaustion of available state remedies—which is the object of § 2244(d)(2). Respondent counters that petitioner's view would trigger a flood of protective filings in federal courts, absorbing their resources in threshold interpretations of state procedural rules. Whatever merits these and other policy arguments may have, it is not the province of this Court to rewrite the statute to accommodate them. We hold as we do because respondent's view seems to us the only permissible interpretation of the text—which may, for all we know, have slighted policy concerns on one or the other side of the issue as part of the legislative compromise that enabled the law to be enacted.
III
The state procedural bars at issue in this case—N. Y. Crim. Proc. Law §§ 440.10(2)(a) and (c) (McKinney 1994)— simply prescribe a rule of decision for a court confronted
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