Circuit Court Opinions

The Second Circuit affirmed a district court’s order denying the defendant’s motion to withdraw his plea. The defendant had argued that the district court misstated the applicable mandatory minimum term of supervised release. The Second Circuit affirmed but noted the parties had incorrectly stated that the defendant bore the burden of persuasion to show the Rule 11 error had affected his substantial rights. Rather, it was the Government’s burden to show such an error was harmless.

After bouncing between the Third Circuit and the Supreme Court, including after an en banc decision, the Third Circuit affirmed the defendant’s conviction but remanded for resentencing, reaffirming its holding that the defendant was not a career offender based on his prior state law convictions, since “the plain language of the guidelines does not include inchoate “attempt” drug crimes like the one that was used as one of Nasir’s predicate offenses.”

The First Circuit reversed a district court’s order denying defendant’s motion to vacate sentence and conviction under 28 USC 2255. The defendant’s appellate attorney had been ineffective for failure to raise a Brady claim, raised by all of her co-defendants on appeal, based on the government’s failure to disclose material that would have undermined the government witnesses’ credibility. The First Circuit held that “any reasonable attorney would have known of the availability of the Brady claim since the co-defendants all raised it and since trial counsel had preserved the issue by raising it in his motion for new trial.”

The Fifth Circuit vacated a defendant’s sentence and remanded for resentencing based on the district court’s erroneous application of the firearm enhancement under USSG 2D1.1(b)(1). The PSR did not include sufficient facts to establish a temporal and spatial relationship between the defendant, the gun, and the drug trafficking activity. The defendant was not shown to have any connection to or knowledge of the gun, and the district court failed to make a record of what its rationale may have been supporting the enhancement.

The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s order vacating the defendant’s conviction after the defendant argued that his due process rights were violated when he was visibly shackled and restrained in a wheelchair with a stun bracelet on his arm during his state trial. The Court held that, even if the restraints were necessary, there was no finding on the record that it was necessary for them to be visible, especially since the defendant’s alleged misconduct mostly took place outside the courtroom and involved “disrespectful” words and gestures outside the presence of the jury. The error was not harmless.

Earlier this week, SCOTUS denied certiorari in Bryant v. U.S. In Bryant, the Eleventh Circuit created a circuit split by holding district courts considering motions for compassionate release or sentence reductions are bound by the narrow criteria under USSG 1B1.13. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, inmates will continue facing dramatically different, and more difficult, standards based on where they were convicted.

The Seventh Circuit reversed a trial court’s order under Rule 36 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which had directed an inmate to return to prison after he had finished his sentence in a separate case. While the court had initially sentenced the defendant in two cases, and had ordered that he serve 18 months after finishing his first sentence, the court was inconsistent in its oral pronouncement and its written judgment. Errors by the court itself are not “clerical errors” under Rule 36, so Rule 36 was not applicable.

The Seventh Circuit reversed a trial court’s bond revocation. The Court held, for the first time, that the standard of review for a revocation decision is an independent review with due deference to a trial court’s findings of fact. The Court held that the trial court here failed to make explicit findings by clear and convincing evidence or sufficiently state why detention was necessary under the circumstances.

The Ninth Circuit affirmed a defendant’s conviction and sentence after he argued that they were illegal in light of US v. Davis, where SCOTUS held that conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery is not a predicate crime of violence under 924(c). The Court held that the defendant’s challenge was foreclosed by his appeal waiver, and the exception to appellate waivers from US v. Torres only applies to illegal sentences, not convictions.

The Eleventh Circuit issued a pair of important opinions regarding compassionate release. The Court held that district courts considering motions under 18 USC 3582(c)(1)(A) may assume that a defendant meets some of the statutory requirements while denying their motion based on their failure to meet others, they may analyze the three statutory requirements in any order, and they may deny a compassionate release motion after considering only one of the statutory factors.