On Wednesday, Obama nominated District Judge Christopher Droney to be elevated to a seat on the Second Circuit. As a DJ in Connecticut, he has been nominated to take over one of the Connecticut seats. The press release is available here.
Droney has been a district court judge since 1997. That means that he has been deciding habeas cases for almost 15 years now. So I looked up his habeas cases. I should have counted how many I saw, but I think it was somewhere between 20 to 30 of them. Disappointingly, a good chunk of them were non-substantive decisions, mostly dismissals without prejudice to allow for exhaustion. A few more were dismissals under the statute of limitations.
Maybe a dozen, at most, were decisions on the merits. I am happy to say that he did grant habeas once, in 2007, in a case called Boyd v. Lantz, 487 F.Supp.2d 3 (D. Conn. 2007). It's actually a really interesting case. The issue was a substantive due process violation based on the Department of Corrections failure to credit his pre-trial confinement towards his sentence. It had to do with whether petitioner should be credited for pre-trial time he served while he raised a double jeopardy challenge to a reprosecution on a felony murder count that had been vacated. The catch was that, while he was challenging the felony murder prosecution, he was also serving a sentence imposed on a burglary conviction that was entered at the same time of the original felony murder conviction. A Conn. statute required that this time not get credited toward the felony murder case because he was serving time on a separate conviction. However, Droney concluded that the application of that statute here violated petitioner's substantive due process rights. It's a really good decision.
Obviously, it's not too much to go on. But at least he has shown a willingness to rule in favor of a habeas petitioner.
Comments