Magwood v. Patterson

After Billy Joe Magwood (plaintiff) was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, his first habeas petition was conditionally granted on the ground the trial court failed to consider statutory mitigating circumstances, leading to a 1986 resentencing where the trial court again imposed death after considering (and rejecting the weight of) those mitigating circumstances; Magwood's state appeals were unsuccessful. In 1997, Magwood filed a new habeas petition challenging this 1986 sentence on fair-warning and ineffective-assistance grounds, which the district court conditionally granted but the Eleventh Circuit reversed as an unreviewable "second or successive" petition under section 2244(b), prompting the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari.