UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ GARY WATKINS, │ Petitioner-Appellant, │ > No. 21-2914 │ v. │ │ GEORGE STEPHENSON, Warden, │ Respondent-Appellee. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit. No. 2:10-cv-13199—Arthur J. Tarnow, District Judge.

Decided and Filed: January 13, 2023

Before: KETHLEDGE, READLER, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.

_________________

COUNSEL ON BRIEF: James C. Thomas, JAMES C. THOMAS P.C., Sterling Heights, Michigan, for Appellant. Jared D. Schultz, OFFICE OF THE MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellee. _________________

OPINION _________________

MURPHY, Circuit Judge. When a state prisoner seeks to amend a habeas petition filed in federal court, the prisoner often will encounter a problem: the one-year statute of limitations will have expired by the time of the amendment. See 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1). If the prisoner timely filed the original petition, this problem may not be insurmountable. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(c)(1)(B), the amended petition will “relate[] back to the date” of the original petition as long as the new claims arose from the same “conduct, transaction, or No. 21-2914 Watkins v. Stephenson Page 2

occurrence” as the old ones. But sometimes a court will dismiss a prisoner’s original petition on procedural grounds, and the prisoner will seek to file a new petition in a later suit. Can the petition in the new suit “relate back to the date” of the petition in the dismissed suit, such that Rule 15 allows the prisoner to rely on that earlier date to determine the new suit’s timeliness?

Gary Watkins’s appeal in this habeas case raises that question. Like every other circuit court to address it, we hold that Rule 15 does not apply across cases in this fashion. And our prior decision in this case forecloses Watkins’s other attempts to establish the timeliness of his amended petition. See Watkins v. Deangelo-Kipp, 854 F.3d 846, 849–52 (6th Cir. 2017). We thus affirm the district court’s dismissal of his petition.

I

Watkins lived next door to Quincey Varner and Varner’s girlfriend in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In January 2006, Watkins reneged on a deal to sell his car to Varner, triggering a feud between them. On January 9, Varner’s girlfriend spoke with Watkins and thought they had resolved their differences. Around 7:00 p.m. the next day, Varner dropped her off at her job as a nurse at a nearby hospital.

A half hour later, police received reports of shots fired at Watkins’s house. Officers arrived to find a bleeding Varner lying unconscious in Watkins’s driveway. Standing nearby, Watkins told the officers to call an ambulance because he had shot Varner. The paramedics who treated Varner spotted no weapons on or around him, but he had two gunshot wounds in his chest, one in his thigh, one in his posterior, one in his shin, and one in his arm. A trail of blood led from Varner’s location back to Watkins’s house.