Whether 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii)'s exception to the exhaustion requirement for 'circumstances' that render state proceedings 'ineffective' can apply when a state court reanimates inordinately delayed proceedings after a petitioner files in federal court

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) requires state prisoners to exhaust all available state remedies prior to filing a federal ha-beas petition, unless “circumstances exist that render such [state-court] process ineffective to protect the rights of the applicant.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii). Below, Petitioner Alan Lane Hicks argued that a 27-year delay, during which the state court assigned his case to a conflicted judge for 15 years and lost his case file, amounted to circumstances that rendered the state’s process ineffective. The Fourth Circuit recog-nized that Hicks’s “journey through West Virginia’s state court system” was “Kafkaesque,” and “no doubt offend[ed] basic notions of how a state should treat its prisoners,” and the state was therefore entitled to no comity. App. 3a, 20a, 15a n.7. But the Fourth Circuit held that a one-sentence order from the state court dis-missing Hicks’s state petition—issued a week after oral argument in the Fourth Circuit—precluded ex-cusing non-exhaustion under § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii). This Court has never directly interpreted § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii), and circuits are irreconcilably split on whether such eleventh-hour, state-court movement is dispositive when analyzing whether inordinate de-lay warrants excusing non-exhaustion under § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii). The question presented is: Whether 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1)(B)(ii)’s exception to the exhaustion requirement for “circumstances” that render state proceedings “ineffective” can apply when a state court reanimates inordinately delayed proceedings after a petitioner files in federal court.