Local Rule 72.4: Habeas Corpus

72.4 Habeas Corpus

(a) Petitions under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2241, 2254 and 2255 shall be filed pursuant to the Rules Governing § 2254 Cases in the United States District Courts and the Rules Governing § 2255 Proceedings in the United States District Courts. No memoranda of law filed in Habeas Corpus proceedings shall exceed twenty-five (25) pages in length, unless the party filing the memorandum of law obtains leave of the judge hearing the motion prior to filing. All memoranda of law shall contain a table of contents. When serving a pro se litigant with a memorandum of law or any other paper which contains citations to authorities that are unpublished or published exclusively on electronic databases, counsel shall include a hard copy of those authorities. Although copies of authorities published only on electronic databases are not required to be filed, copies shall be provided upon request to opposing counsel who lack access to electronic databases.

(b) Subject to the requirement of subsection (c), the petitioner shall file the original verified petition with the Clerk at Syracuse, New York. Applications for a writ of habeas corpus made by persons in custody shall be filed, heard and determined in the district court for the district in which they were convicted and sentenced provided, however, that if the convenience of the parties and witnesses requires a hearing in a different district, such application shall be transferred to any district that the assigned judge finds or determines to be more convenient.

(c) Before a second or successive application is filed in this Court, the applicant shall move in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for an order authorizing the district court to consider the application.

(d) If the respondent submits the state-court records with its answer to the petition, the respondent must properly identify the records in the answer and arrange them in chronological order. The respondent must also sequentially number the pages of the state-court record so that citations to those records will identify the exact location where the information appears. If documents are separately bound and the citation to the documents is easily identifiable, the respondent does not need to repaginate the documents.

(e) Effective for all Habeas Corpus Petitions pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §2254 filed after July 1, 2013, service of process shall be done via electronic means, namely via an email Notice of Electronic Filing through the Court's CM/ECF system. Once service is ordered by the Court, the Office of Attorney General for New York State will receive email notification and be given ninety (90) days within which to file a response. This time will allow the Office of Attorney General to obtain the records from the underlying state court and file their response to the petition.