Mobuary v. State

Jason Mobuary pleaded guilty in 2003 to enticing a child for indecent purposes. Years later he asked the trial court for permission to file a late appeal and for a lawyer, and the trial court said no to both in December 2019. Mobuary then navigated a maze of appellate deadlines, including a discretionary application to the Supreme Court of Georgia that was transferred to the Court of Appeals, which eventually gave him extra time to file his notice of appeal. The Court of Appeals dismissed his appeal anyway, calculating that his notice of appeal came 167 days too late. But it apparently missed that Chief Justice's statewide judicial emergency orders during the COVID-19 pandemic had paused the filing clock for part of that period, and that Mobuary's discretionary appeal proceeding had extended his deadline. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed to review the case, found the dismissal wrong, and sent it back so the Court of Appeals could resume handling the appeal.

The Court of Appeals clearly erred in dismissing Mobuary's appeal as untimely because his notice of appeal was filed within the deadline set by the discretionary appeal order once that deadline is adjusted for the tolling caused by the Chief Justice's statewide judicial emergency orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decision confirms that Georgia's pandemic-era judicial emergency orders actually paused filing deadlines for litigants, including people representing themselves, and that appellate courts must account for that tolling when deciding whether an appeal was filed on time.

Petition for writ of certiorari granted, judgment vacated, and case remanded

1. The court traced the procedural history: after the trial court denied Mobuary's motion for an out-of-time appeal, he pursued a discretionary application process that gave the Court of Appeals authority to set a new deadline for filing his notice of appeal, separate from the original judgment date.
2. The Court of Appeals' May 8, 2020 order gave Mobuary ten days to file his notice of appeal, but that ten-day clock fell within the period when the Chief Justice's statewide judicial emergency orders (issued to address the COVID-19 pandemic) paused nonconstitutional filing deadlines statewide.
3. Applying the tolling rule, the court found the ten-day period did not actually begin running until July 14, 2020, when the emergency tolling ended, making Mobuary's deadline July 24, 2020, a date by which his notice of appeal had already been filed and docketed.
4. Because the Court of Appeals had calculated the deadline without accounting for this tolling, it wrongly concluded the notice of appeal was 167 days late, when in fact it was timely under the corrected calculation.
5. Since the dismissal rested on a clearly erroneous timeliness finding, the Supreme Court of Georgia held that granting review, vacating the dismissal, and sending the case back to the Court of Appeals was warranted so the appeal could proceed.

• out-of-time appeal
• COVID-19 judicial emergency
• appellate deadlines
• certiorari review
• discretionary appeal