We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
MISSOURI UNLAWFUL USE OF GUN STATUTE STILL A VIOLENT CRIME
The first appellate casualty relying in part on the Supreme Court’s March 6th Beckles decision was reported this week.
Steve Hudson pleaded guilty to felon-in-possession of a gun under in 18 U.S.C. 922(g). The district court enhanced Steve’s sentence under USSG 2K2.1(a)(4)(A) based on Steve having a prior conviction for a “crime of violence,” that being a conviction for unlawful use of a firearm under Missouri Rev. Stat. § 571.030.1(4). The district court relied on an 8th Circuit 2009 holding in United States v. Pulliam, that a violation of that Missouri statute is a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.
In Pulliam, the 8th found the same Missouri statute to be a crime of violence under the ACCA, because the crime fell under the Force Clause, that is, it “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another.” Pulliam held that “[i]t goes without saying that displaying an operational weapon before another in an angry or threatening manner” fits the Force Clause to a “T.”
The 8th Circuit swept aside his arguments. In Johnson, the Court held that a portion of the definition of “violent felony” in the ACCA known as the Residual Clause. Relying on Beckles, the Circuit held Johnson did not apply: “Although the definition of “crime of violence” under the guidelines until recently included an identically-worded residual clause, the guidelines are not subject to constitutional vagueness challenges.”
More to the point, the Circuit noted, Pulliam was a Force Clause case, so that even without Beckles, Johnson would not have applied.
The Circuit agreed with Steve that the Curtis Johnson case addressed the Force Clause, holding that the Clause “requires the use, attempted use, or threatened use of ‘violent force—that is, force capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person’.” But even so, the Missouri statute fit under the Force Clause: Steve was convicted of “exhibiting a weapon that is readily capable of lethal use in an angry or threatening manner.” “Lethal” the Court said, means “capable of causing death.” Therefore, the Court said, “threatening use of such a weapon necessarily involves a threatened use of violent force, not merely an unwanted physical touching. Pulliam, therefore, is consistent with Curtis Johnson.”
Steve’s final attack was that because the Missouri statute would support a conviction if the gun had been displayed in either a threatening or an angry manner, the statute set forth alternative elements for committing an offense, and categorically the crime was too broad to fit in the Force Clause. His argument, apparently, was that Mathis prohibited the court from figuring out whether the crime had been committed in an “angry” manner or in a “threatening” manner.
The 8th Circuit rejected the argument. Pulliam, it said, “concluded that both means of committing the offense (an angry display or a threatening display) involve the requisite threatened use of force.” Thus, no matter how Steve was convicted – “angry” or “threatening” – the Missouri crime counted as a crime of violence to enhance his federal sentence.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
4TH CIRCUIT REVERSES SELF, HOLDS VIRGINIA COMMON-LAW ROBBERY IS NOT VIOLENT
With all of the recent news about Beckles v. United States, where the Supreme Court held that constitutional vagueness cannot apply to Guidelines sentences, it’s easy to forget that there is still a burgeoning legal industry in weighing whether crimes once thought to be violent for Armed Career Criminal Act cases are still violent.
The ACCA enhances the sentence of a felon caught with a gun if he (or in rare cases, she) has three prior qualifying convictions. The convictions may be serious drug offenses or “crimes of violence.” A “crime of violence” has traditionally been (1) burglary, arson, extortion or use of explosives (the “Enumerated Clause”); (2) a crime that involves use or attempt to use physical force (the “Force Clause”); or (3) a crime that involves significant risk that physical force may be used (the “Residual Clause”).
In 2015, Johnson v. United States held that the Residual Clause was unconstitutionally vague. In the wake of the decision – which was held by the Supreme Court to retroactively apply to people already convicted of ACCA offenses – prisoners have been returning to court to escape harsh ACCA sentences (which start at 15 years) where their predicate offenses no longer qualify.
A substantial procedural problem for a lot of the defendants is that the district courts often did not bother to explain under which ACCA clause their prior crimes fit. It hardly seemed to matter: if someone had been convicted of robbery, it seemed to fit under the Force Clause or the Residual Clause, so it hardly mattered to the outcome which clause it was on which the sentencing judge relied.
After Johnson, however, it suddenly made a big difference. It certainly did to Bobby Winston, who got 275 months back on 2002 for a felon-in-possession charge, where one of the predicate crimes was Virginia common-law robbery. The Johnsonretroactivity gave prisoners a one-year window to file motions under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2255 seeking relief if Residual Clause cases had been used to bootstrap their convictions into ACCA sentences. Bobby filed, arguing that the Virginia common-law robbery could no longer be a predicate for his lengthy sentence.
Bobby ran straight into a procedural buzzsaw. The government argued that his 2255 motion had to be dismissed., because the district court had never said Virginia common-law robbery was a Residual Clause offense. The government contended it was a Force Clause offense, which was consistent with a 22-year old 4th Circuit decision that the Virginia crime employed physical force.
Monday, the 4th Circuit handed Bobby a win. First, the Circuit rejected the government’s procedural roadblock, holding that which the sentencing record did not establish that the Residual Clause served as the basis for concluding that Bobby’s common-law robbery conviction was a violent felony, “nothing in the law requires a court to specify which clause… it relied upon in imposing a sentence.” The appellate panel said, “We will not penalize a movant for a court’s discretionary choice not to specify under which clause of Section 924(e)(2)(B) an offense qualified as a violent felony. Thus, imposing the burden on movants urged by the government in the present case would result in selective application of the new rule of constitutional law announced in Johnson, violating the principle of treating similarly situated defendants the same.”
But is Virginia common-law robbery a violent crime? The 4th noted that since its 1995 decision that the offense qualified, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Force Clause only applied to “violent force… capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person.” Applying that standard, the Circuit said, requires that the federal court adhere to how state courts apply the offense, focusing on “the “minimum conduct criminalized by state law, including any conduct giving rise to a realistic probability, not a theoretical possibility that a state would apply the law and uphold a conviction based on such conduct.”
Common-law robbery or a simple purse-snatching?
Virginia courts have held that commission of common-law robbery by violence requires only a “slight” degree of violence, “for anything which calls out resistance is sufficient.” The violence used to commit common-law robbery “does not need to be great or cause any actual harm to the victim.” Thus, in one case, when a defendant grabbed a woman’s purse with force enough to spin her around but not cause her to fall, the force was enough for common-law robbery, but was not violent force within the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition.
Therefore, the 4th said, Virginia common-law robbery was no longer a crime of violence, and it will not support an ACCA conviction.
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
SUPREME COURT FURTHER MUDDLES GUIDELINES
In a decision long awaited by federal inmates, the Supreme Court yesterday held that unlike criminal statutes, the federal sentencing guidelines can never be void for vagueness. But in so ruling, the Court may have weakened the guidelines rather than strengthened them.
The history: In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. United States that a part of the definition of “crime of violence” found in the Armed Career Criminal Act – the “residual clause” that swept up offenses with a significant chance that someone might get hurt as being violent – was unconstitutionally vague. That ruling made sense: crimes such as drunk driving and not stopping for the police were being called “violent,” and on the strength of such dubious definitions, the law was making 51-month sentences into 15-year bits.
Unfortunately, the definition of “crime of violence” (along with the “residual clause”) was not just an ACCA provision. Instead, the same definition had metastasized throughout the criminal code and guidelines. Under the legal principle that quid est ius gander anserem condimentum (“what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”), inmates whose sentences had been shot into low-earth orbit by the guidelines’ “career offender” provision immediately began arguing that their sentences were based on an unconstitutionally vague “residual clause” as well.
The United States Sentencing Commission lent some support to the argument. After Johnson, the Commission changed the guidelines’ “crime of violence” definition to comport with Johnson. But a few courts of appeal held that guidelines are different from statutes, and could never be void for vagueness.
Yesterday’s Decision: Beckles v. United States was such a case. Travis Beckles had been sentenced to double prison time for possessing a sawed-off shotgun under the “career offender” guideline. If the ACCA “crime of violence” definition was unintelligible, Travis argued, so was the guidelines definition that matched it word for word.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court disagreed. Because guidelines are merely advisory and judges hold the final authority on sentences, the Court held, defendants cannot successfully argue that a sentencing guideline is so vaguely worded as to violate the constitutional right to due process. Laws that “fix” the sentencing range can be challenged in ways that “advisory guidelines” simply cannot.
The Fallout:Beckles hobbles what has up to now been a well-honed defense tool, while exposing contradictions between the guidelines in theory and in practice in a way that almost guarantees further litigation.
Not if it’s in the guidelines…
One former federal prosecutor notes, “Saying those guidelines can’t be challenged for vagueness takes away a tool for review and puts the onus on the Sentencing Commission to keep going back and looking at how they are being applied.”
Up to 2005, judges had been required by law to apply the Guidelines in sentencing. But in United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court decided mandatory guidelines the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984created were unconstitutional. Instead of throwing the whole law out, the court decided the guidelines should be considered advisory.
The broad opinion Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in Beckles built on Booker, differentiates between sentencing provisions in laws like the ACCA and the guidelines, which are subject to district courts’ discretion.
A former associate deputy attorney general who is now a law professor said the Beckles decision is a symptom of the hybrid situation that flowed from Booker: “You live in this weird world where the guidelines are both advisory and highly influential.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in Beckles with a scathing rejection of the majority’s reasoning. She argued that while the guidelines may be “advisory” in name, in practice judges often consider them a default, meaning they should get the same treatment as a law under the constitution. Ironically, this is the same argument that helped carry the day in a 2011 decision, Peugh v. United States, which held the guidelines could be subject to an ex post facto analysis.
Sotomayor argued that Booker tweaked the guidelines’s status but left them at the heart of the sentencing consideration — or as the court put it last year in Molina-Martinez v. United States, the “basis” for the sentence. “It follows from the central role that the guidelines play at sentencing,” Sotomayor wrote, “that they should be susceptible to vagueness challenges under the due process clause,” she wrote.
Another law professor who filed an amicus brief in Beckles argued yesterday that the majority’s ruling ignores the “messy reality” of federal sentencing. “It reads as though the federal sentencing guidelines are just advice for district court judges that they can take or leave as they want, but that’s just not true,” she said.
An optimistic footnote to Beckles: Justice Kennedy’s short concurring opinion may hint at another option for defendants. He wrote that while the legal tests for constitutional vagueness are ill fitted to the sentencing guidelines, a defendant might still run into a sentence that is “so arbitrary that it implicates constitutional concerns.” Kennedy said, “In that instance, a litigant might use the word vague in a general sense — that is to say, imprecise or unclear — in trying to establish that the sentencing decision was flawed.”
Most notably, Beckles underscores to district court judges that the guidelines are not just purely advisory, but occupy a place in the law that is considerably less that statute, and perhaps much less than regulation as well. “It sends a signal to district court judges and reinforces the message that is already out there that these guidelines are purely advisory,” one lawyer said.
That may embolden courts to deviate from guidelines to an even greater extent than they have before. Courts have repeatedly held that a within-guidelines sentence is “presumptively reasonable.” If those guidelines can be so vague as to defy fairness – too vague to survive a constitutional analysis were they statutes – how long can such a reasonableness presumption endure?
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
7th CIRCUIT SAYS KIDNAPPING NOT CRIME OF VIOLENCE
Antwon Jenkins was convicted of kidnapping and carrying a firearm during a crime of violence. He appealed, claiming the government had violated the plea agreement. He got 188 months for the kidnapping and another 120 months for the 18 USC 924(c) charge.
Before the appeal was decided, Johnson v. United States was decided by the Supreme Court, holding the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act was unconstitutionally vague. Antwon amended his appeal to claim that the 924(c) conviction was void, because kidnapping could only be a crime of violence under the residual clause, making the conviction unconstitutional under Johnson.
Last Friday, the 7th Circuit agreed. It found that the first element of kidnapping – unlawfully seizing, confining, inveigling, decoying, kidnapping, abducting, or carrying away — does not necessarily require the use of force. The government argued that because the second element, holding for ransom or reward or otherwise, must be unlawful, it necessarily requires at a minimum the threat of physical force, but the Circuit disagreed. “Holding can be accomplished without physical force. For example, a perpetrator could lure his victim into a room and lock the victim inside against his or her will. This would satisfy the holding element of kidnapping under 18 USC § 1201(a) without using, threatening to use, or attempting to use physical force.”
The decision brings the 7th Circuit into harmony with other circuits that have held that similar crimes of false imprisonment and kidnapping by deception do not have physical force as an element.”
Antwon had not raised the issue in the trial court, but the 7th found that despite this, he had met the stringent FRCrimP 52(b) “plain error” standard for bringing it up for the first time on appeal. The Court said, “A 120‐month prison sentence for a nonexistent crime undermines the fairness of the judicial proceedings and cannot stand.”
For state prisoners who have exhausted their habeas corpus claims, 28 USC § 2254 permits filing the claims in federal court. Such cases are not easy to win, because federal courts will go with the state court’s decision unless it’s absolutely unreasonable. Even filing the cases on time is tough.
Mostly, 2254 does not affect federal prisoners, but a decision last Friday by the 11th Circuit delivers a stark message that federal inmate litigants should take to heart: if your lawyer drops your case without telling you, that’s one thing. But if he or she is just stupid – even really, really stupid – you’re bound by counsel’s mistakes.
Ernest Cadet, a Florida prisoner, was denied habeas corpus relief in state court. Under the convoluted rules that apply to 2254 motions, his one-year clock then started running for filing in federal court. It stopped with only 5 days left when he filed for review with the Florida Supreme Court.
But even an average lawyer should know how to count…
While his Supreme Court petition was pending, Ernie hired Attorney Goodman, a guy who may have been a “good man” but was a lousy attorney. When the Supreme Court turned Ernie’s motion down, the inmate told Goodman they didn’t have much time to file a 2254. He said inmates in the law library warned him that he had to act fast. Goodwin replied he had read the statute, and Ernie had a full year, asking “who are you going to believe, the real lawyer or the jailhouse lawyer?”
The correct answer was “the jailhouse lawyer.” Goodwin filed the motion within the time he thought Ernie had, but it really about a year late. The federal district court threw out the petition as untimely. Ernie appealed.
The 11th Circuit upheld the dismissal. Inmates love to talk about “equitable tolling” as an end run around statutory deadlines, but the plain fact, the Circuit said, is that equitable tolling is an extraordinary remedy “limited to rare and exceptional circumstances and typically applied sparingly.” To warrant equitable tolling, a prisoner has to show he has been pursuing his rights diligently but that some extraordinary circumstance prevented timely filing.
The Court said attorney miscalculation of a filing deadline “is simply not sufficient to warrant equitable tolling, particularly in the post-conviction context where prisoners have no constitutional right to counsel.” The relevant distinction should be between attorney negligence – which is “constructively attributable to the client” – and “attorney misconduct that is not constructively attributable” to the client because counsel has abandoned the prisoner. A lawyer’s “near-total failure to communicate with petitioner or to respond to petitioner’s many inquiries and requests over a period of several years” might be abandonment. “Common sense,” Justice Alito concluded in a prior Supreme Court case, “dictates that a litigant cannot be held constructively responsible for the conduct of an attorney who is not operating as his agent in any meaningful sense of that word.”
The problem in this case is that Goodman never abandoned Ernie. He kept communicating, but arrogantly dismissed the possibility Ernie and his jailhouse lawyer friends might be right without doing as much as five minutes’ worth of research to see whether they might be.
Ernie “acted with reasonable diligence,” the Court said, “but the reasonable diligence and extraordinary circumstance requirements are not blended factors; they are separate elements, both of which must be met before there can be any equitable tolling.” Just because an agent (the lawyer) is grossly negligent does not mean he had abandoned his principal (the client).
Goodman was stupid, but he did not disappear on Ernie. The 11th held that “because the attorney is the prisoner’s agent, and under well-settled principles of agency law, the principal bears the risk of negligent conduct on the part of his agent… as a result, when a petitioner’s post-conviction attorney misses a filing deadline, the petitioner is bound by the oversight.
In a remarkable decision handed down by the 4th Circuit last Thursday, a deaf inmate’s claim that the BOP violated his 8th Amendment and 1st Amendment rights by denying him a sign-language interpreter and videophone link.
The inmate complained that he was denied an interpreter to assist at medical appointments, and to enable him to take a class required because of the nature of his offense. He also said communications with the outside was limited to an antiquated TTY phone device, which he could only use when a BOP staff person trained in TTY was available to supervise. Often, he said, he was denied TTY access because of staff shortages or just because of arbitrary reasons, and he could never use the TTY on nights or weekends.
The Circuit reversed a district court decision that threw out all of the claims, saying the inmate did not have to show he had been harmed by the 8th Amendment deliberate indifference, just that there was a substantial risk of harm. As for the 1st Amendment claim, the Court swept away BOP claims of the security risks of a videophone, holding that the Bureau could easily monitor videophone calls just as it did TTY calls.
The BOP tried to derail the case by promising to provide interpreters in the future, stating that inmates would be provided “with a qualified interpreter… if necessary for effective communication during religious ceremonies or programs.” That was good enough for the district court, but the 4th swept the promises aside: “It is well established that a defendant’s voluntary cessation of a challenged practice moots an action only if subsequent events made it absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur,” the Court said. “Even if we ignore the equivocation inherent in the promise to provide interpreters ‘if necessary’ the statement amounts to little more than a ‘bald assertion’ of future compliance, which is insufficient to meet BOP’s burden.”
We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
It’s been rough sailing for “crimes of violence” in the last few years, as courts have repeatedly limited the types of prior offenses that may be considered by federal courts as crimes of violence. This week, another one – a Florida burglary offense – fell.
This may seem rather dry to a lot of people. Who cares whether a past conviction was violent or not? A lot of people, it turns out, because whether a defendant’s prior crimes are crimes of violence or not makes a dramatic difference in sentencing. Under the Armed Career Criminal Act, for example, a convicted felon caught during deer season with a shotgun faces a maximum sentence of 10 years for violating 18 USC 922(g). But if his criminal history includes three crimes of violence, the minimum sentence starts at 15 years and maxes out at life. A number of other statutes and Guidelines also mete out additional punishment depending on whether a defendant’s criminal history is violent or not.
But doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Who needs violent criminals stalking our streets? After all, you convicted felons out there, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime…
Sure, piling on additional punishment for already-punished misdeeds is viscerally appealing, until you get into the fine print of what the law considers a violent crime to be. Right now, it’s defined as any burglary, extortion, arson or crime involving an explosive. Additionally, it’s any other crime that involves force or the threat of force.
Most of that sounds good, but what about the guy who 20 years ago, used to sneak into the neighbors’ chicken coops and steal some eggs? Or boosted some Twinkies from Walmart? Those are burglaries in most states. Those “crimes of violence” hardly make him a likely chainsaw killer on a rampage.
Part of the problem is that the parameters of the law of burglary vary widely from state to state. What’s called a burglary in one state may be called a simple breaking and entering elsewhere. In other words, the “crime of violence” definition was punishing people depending on whether state legislatures decided to use the “b”-word – burglary – in a statute.
In Taylor v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the term “burglary” to “generic” burglary – unlawful entry into a building or other fixed structure. Breaking into a car, boat, or airplane wouldn’t count. Taylor further made the fateful determination that the analysis of whether a prior conviction for “burglary” satisfied the generic definition of burglary was to be performed on a “categorical” basis. That is, the sentencing court was not to look at the actual facts of the case to decide whether the defendant’s conduct constituted generic burglary; rather, the court was to analyze the statute under which he was convicted to determine whether it “categorically” qualified as generic burglary.
The Supreme Court followed that decision in 2013 with Descamps v. United States, which expanded the use of the “categorical” approach. Johnson v. United States followed two years later, in which the Supreme Court eviscerated the statutory definition of “crime of violence” by invalidating the catch-all residual clause, which included in the definition any offense that carried the risk of harm to a victim, regardless of a defendant’s intent.
Then, last summer, the Supreme Court decided Mathis v. United States, which resoundingly endorsed and further broadened the use of Descamps’ “categorical approach.”
One of the guys who cares about it is Juan Gabriel Garcia-Martinez. In 2009 Juan, a Mexican citizen in the United States illegally, was convicted in Florida of 2nd-degree burglary of a dwelling under Florida Statute § 810.02(3).
Florida defines burglary as “[e]ntering a dwelling, a structure, or a conveyance with the intent to commit an offense therein…” with the intent to commit an offense or a forcible felony. A 2nd degree burglary is one in which while committing the offense, the offender does not make an assault or battery and is not and does not become armed with a dangerous weapon or explosive. A “dwelling” is “a building or conveyance of any kind, including any attached porch, whether such building or conveyance is temporary or permanent, mobile or immobile, which has a roof over it and is designed to be occupied by people lodging therein at night, together with the curtilage thereof.” § 810.011(2)
After his Florida 2nd degree burglary conviction, Juan got booted from the United States and told never to come back. But he did. However, four years later, Juan was back, and immigration agents caught up with him in a Florida jail after he had been arrested for battery. He later pled guilty to illegal reentry after deportation.
The presentence investigation report assigned a base offense level of 8 under USSG § 2L1.2(a) and a 16-level increase under USSG § 2L1.2(b)(1)(A)(ii) for having committed a crime of violence – the 2nd degree burglary – prior to being deported. As a result, Juan faced a sentence of 41 to 51 months imprisonment.
On Wednesday, the 11th Circuit vacated the sentence. It held that the Florida 2nd-degree burglary statute was broader than the generic definition of burglary. The Florida definition of a “dwelling” included not just the building itself, but the curtilage as well. Curtilage is defined in Florida as an enclosure around a residence, such as a law surrounded by a hedgerow or a fenced-in backyard. The Circuit said, “Florida’s inclusion of curtilage in its definition of dwelling makes its burglary of a dwelling offense non-generic. Curtilage… is not categorically used or intended for use as a human habitation, home or residence because it can include the yard and, as the State acknowledges, potentially even outbuildings as long as they are located within the enclosure.”
Everywhere inside the stockade is curtilage…
Because Florida law defined curtilage as part of the dwelling for purposes of burglary, the 11th held the statute was indivisible, and thus – no matter what the facts of Juan’s burglary might have been – it was not a crime of violence.
The effect of the holding will be to cut Juan’s Guidelines range to a maximum of 14 months.
Steve Hudson pleaded guilty to felon-in-possession of a gun under in 18 U.S.C. 922(g). The district court enhanced Steve’s sentence under USSG 2K2.1(a)(4)(A) based on Steve having a prior conviction for a “crime of violence,” that being a conviction for unlawful use of a firearm under Missouri Rev. Stat. § 571.030.1(4). The district court relied on an 8th Circuit 2009 holding in United States v. Pulliam, that a violation of that Missouri statute is a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.
The 8th Circuit swept aside his arguments. In Johnson, the Court held that a portion of the definition of “violent felony” in the ACCA known as the Residual Clause. Relying on Beckles, the Circuit held Johnson did not apply: “Although the definition of “crime of violence” under the guidelines until recently included an identically-worded residual clause, the guidelines are not subject to constitutional vagueness challenges.”
Steve’s final attack was that because the Missouri statute would support a conviction if the gun had been displayed in either a threatening or an angry manner, the statute set forth alternative elements for committing an offense, and categorically the crime was too broad to fit in the Force Clause. His argument, apparently, was that Mathis prohibited the court from figuring out whether the crime had been committed in an “angry” manner or in a “threatening” manner.
