Whether the availability of equitable tolling requires consideration of the totality of the circumstances

QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. Petitioner’s request for state post-conviction review was deemed filed three days late because of a series of errors by the court clerk, who: e incorrectly instructed Petitioner’s counsel that no filing fee was required; e stamped the submission “RECEIVED AND FILED,” thus representing to counsel that the petition was filed when it instead was neither filed nor even docketed; e immediately lost the petition; and e failed to comply with internal procedures that required notifying Petitioner of any filing deficiency. In a departure from the analysis employed by four other circuits—all of which review the totality of the circumstances—the Eleventh Circuit considered only a single fact (that counsel wrongly relied on filing fee information from the court clerk) and therefore declined to consider any of the clerk’s subsequent serial errors that prevented Petitioner from discovering the alleged filing error. As a result, the court refused to entertain any of Petitioner’s claims for relief (other than the claim under Atkins v. Virginia). This case thus presents the following question: Whether the availability of equitable tolling requires consideration of the totality of the circumstances, as held by the First, Third, Sixth and Ninth Circuits, or whether the Court of Appeals below is correct that it can disregard altogether and not consider otherwise material facts simply because Petitioner was represented by counsel. ii 2. Whether the Court of Appeals erred under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 and contravened the principles articulated in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), when it deferred to the state court’s factual determination that Petitioner was not intellectually disabled, notwithstanding the state court’s failure to apply the very clinical standards that it found governed the analysis (and that this Court has since confirmed apply), where: e Petitioner was first diagnosed as “educable[] mentally retarded” at age six; e the state court found that Petitioner’s IQ is as low as 70; and e the “gold standard” test measuring adaptive functioning demonstrated statistically significant limitations in six of ten adaptive functioning areas, and neither the test nor its results were ever challenged by the State of Alabama.