ROBB, J.
Lawrence contends that his request for appeal was timely because of the prison mailbox rule. The “prison mailbox rule,” recognized by the United States Supreme Court in Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266, 276 (1998), provides that pro se filings from an incarcerated litigant are considered filed at the time they are delivered to prison authorities for forwarding to the court. The incarcerated litigant in Houston appealed the denial of his petition for habeas corpus relief, giving his pro se notice of appeal to prison officials for mailing twenty-seven days after the judgment. The district court stamped the notice filed on the thirty-first day after the judgment, one day after the thirty-day filing period, and the Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal as untimely. The Supreme Court noted that prisoners cannot take the steps other litigants can take to monitor the processing of their pleadings:
[A prisoner’s] control over the processing of his notice necessarily ceases as soon as he hands it over to the only public officials to whom he has access – the prison authorities – and the only information he will likely have is the date he delivered the notice to those prison authorities and the date ultimately stamped on his notice.
Id. at 271-72. Accordingly, the Court held that, for purposes of the Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure governing the time for filing a notice of appeal, the pro se prisoner’s notice of appeal was considered filed at the moment of delivery to prison authorities for mailing – three days before the deadline – and the appeal was therefore timely. [Footnote omitted.]
Indiana recently recognized the prison mailbox rule in the post-conviction context. In Dowell v. State, 908 N.E.2d 643 (Ind. Ct. App. 2009), trans. pending, an incarcerated post-conviction petitioner put a motion to correct error in the prison mail system on the thirtieth day after his petition for post-conviction relief was denied. The motion to correct error was file-stamped by the trial court on the thirty-second day and subsequently denied. On the petitioner’s appeal from the denial of his motion to correct error, the State argued this court lacked jurisdiction because the motion to correct error was untimely. Noting the lack of published authority in Indiana regarding the prison mailbox rule, we cited the “compellingly articulate[ ]” reasons given in Houston for deeming a federal prisoner’s pro se motions to be filed upon delivery to the prison’s mail system. Id. at 647. We also noted that even before Houston was decided, this court held in relation to a trial rule governing filing by mail that a pro se prisoner litigant’s deposit of a motion to correct errors with the prison’s law library for mailing four days before the filing deadline conformed with the rule’s requirements. Id. at 647-48 (citing Baker v. State, 505 N.E.2d 498, 499-500 (Ind. Ct. App. 1987)). “Given this [Indiana] authority and our agreement with the rationale of Houston, we now expressly hold that the prison mailbox rule is applicable to state post-conviction matters.” Id. at 648.
The State contends that Dowell held “that the prisoner mailbox rule applies only in state post-conviction proceedings” and depositing a pleading with prison officials is not recognized by Trial Rule 5(F) as a permissible manner of filing. Brief of Appellee at 8 (emphasis added). Although Dowell did hold that the prison mailbox rule applies in post-conviction proceedings, it was a post-conviction proceeding at issue in that case. We do not believe the holding in Dowell was intended to foreclose the prison mailbox rule’s application to other matters; there was simply no need to make a more sweeping pronouncement as to its application to situations not relevant to that case. We are confronted in this case with the prison mailbox rule’s application to a direct appeal, however, and we can discern no reason why the same analysis making it applicable to post-conviction proceedings should not also apply to direct appeals. . . . A pro se prisoner is in the same position with respect to filing his pleadings regardless of the nature of the proceedings. For the reasons stated in Houston and Dowell, we hold the prison mailbox rule applies in direct appeals.
DARDEN, J., and MATHIAS, J., concur.