Rule 44.6.Motions

Rule 44.6 lays out pretrial motion practice in two sequential windows. The petitioner may file pretrial motions within sixty days of the petition being filed. The respondent then gets a longer window — ninety days from filing — to file its own motions. Staggering the deadlines this way lets the respondent’s motions account for whatever the petitioner has already raised.

Rather than spelling out its own procedure for responding to these motions, Rule 44.6 points to Rule 6.2, the Uniform Superior Court Rule that governs motion responses generally. That keeps capital habeas motion practice tied into the same response framework used across ordinary superior court litigation, instead of creating a separate set of response rules just for these cases.

The result is a predictable early motion calendar inside an otherwise compressed case: petitioner’s motions by day sixty, respondent’s motions by day ninety, with Rule 6.2 handling everything about how and when each side answers what the other has filed.