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11TH CIRCUIT SENDS § 2255 MOTION BACK TO DISTRICT COURT FOR CLISBY ERROR
A Clisby is not – to the best of my knowledge (and I try to keep up with this sort of thing because my three grandkids expect nothing less) – the hottest new toy this Christmas season. Instead, Clisby is an 11th Circuit decision that requires a federal district court “to resolve all claims for relief raised in a petition for writ of habeas corpus… regardless whether habeas relief is granted or denied.” The holding applies to § 2254 and § 2255 motions alike.
Cliff Senter filed a § 2255 motion claiming that his Armed Career Criminal Act conviction could not stand after Johnson v. United States was decided, because one of the priors it relied on was an attempted Alabama robbery, and – because no such crime was on the books in Alabama when he was convicted of it – it had no elements, and thus could not be matched with the elements test of 18 USC § 924e.
It was a pretty solid argument, but the district court misinterpreted it to be a collateral attack on the attempted robbery conviction. While a post-conviction movant can argue that a state prior conviction doesn’t meet the ACCA test, he or she cannot argue that the state conviction is invalid and should be thrown out. That question needed to be resolved by the state courts that imposed the conviction to begin with. The district court thought that Cliff was attacking the validity of the Alabama attempted robbery conviction, and held Cliff couldn’t do that in a § 2255 motion.
Of course he could not, but sometimes an argument does double duty, and when that happens, the court has to apply it to the issue properly before it, even if it could apply equally to an issue that – if raised – would not properly be before it. Last week, the 11th Circuit reversed the dismissal of Cliff’s § 2255 motion, holding that
“when a habeas petitioner… presents a claim in clear and simple language such that the district court may not misunderstand it,” a district court must address and resolve the claim. In this case, Senter clearly raised the claim that his ‘attempted robbery cannot qualify as a violent felony under either the force clause or as an enumerated offense because it is a non-existent offense and therefore does not have any elements and by misconstruing it as a collateral attack on his state conviction, the district court failed to resolve his actual claim and violated Clisby.”
To be sure, a district judge may grow weary of deciding an especially prolix § 2255 motion – with issue after issue, and each issue having multiple sub-issues which themselves have multiple sub-parts – but that’s what comes with the cool robe and lifetime sinecure.
This decision remind us that Clisby will cause a case to be sent back until the district court finishes all of the paperwork.
Senter v. United States, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 35704 (11th Cir. November 13, 2020)
– Thomas L. Root