UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS 

EASTERN DIVISION 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

 v. 

COREY WILLIAMS 

 

No. 12 C 2394 

Judge James B. Zagel 

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER 

 Corey Williams seeks relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 on a variety of grounds. He pled 

guilty after entering a plea agreement. Williams was part of a drug dealing conspiracy; he was 

charged on 21 August 2008 with brokering cocaine deals resulting in sales over a half-kilogram 

of crack. He was charged, too, with selling three firearms. He was charged on 5 November 

2008 in a second indictment for conspiracy to deal in firearms and to do so without a license. 

There were three counts of possessing firearms despite his status as a felon. The indictments 

were superseded by a single information which alleged the narcotics conspiracy from the first 

indictment in one count and the dealing in firearms without a license charge in the second 

indictment. 

 Two days after the information was filed Williams, pursuant to a written plea agreement, 

pled guilty to those charges. The plea was accepted after a proper course of inquiry, responses 

and explanations of the terms of the agreement. At sentencing the Guideline was not challenged 

by defense counsel. My own review of the rationale of the proposed Guideline was correct. I 

found the Guideline to be correct. Williams’ counsel argued that the career offender guideline 

overstated the gravity of petitioner’s criminal history (due to the nature of the prior convictions 

and the youth of petitioner at the earlier convictions). The other argument was that I should 

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exercise my discretion to use the powder cocaine guidelines rather than the crack cocaine 

guidelines. I did find that the prior criminal history did overstate the gravity of Williams’ past 

bad conduct. Having done so I departed or varied from the correct Guideline of 262-327 months 

by 82 months and imposed a period of incarceration of 180 months (15 years). 

 Williams appealed my denial of his motion to reduce sentence. The motion was filed 

under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2). The Court of Appeals noted that amendments to the crack cocaine 

guidelines did not and do not affect the career offender guideline under which Williams was 

sentenced. United States v. Williams, No. 12-2608 (7th Cir. 2013)(Unreported Order of March 20, 

2013). 

 Eleven months before that ruling on appeal Williams filed this petition for relief. The 

petition claiming ineffective assistance of counsel is based on several assertions of failure to 

object to various actions.1

 There was nothing ineffective about defense counsel’s failure to raise speedy trial 

objections. Williams ignores the fact that the unlicensed dealing charge did not come into the 

case until almost three months after the first indictment and he was arrested on that count on 20 

November 2008, 15 days after indictment. I excluded time for allowable reasons under the 

Speedy Trial Act, which rulings petitioner does not dispute here. The charges in the superseding 

information were charged in the two earlier indictments. All that happened with the information 

was that some charges were not included. Williams cannot bring a claim for denial of speedy 

trial for offenses of which he was not convicted. The convictions here were the product of plea 

 

1

 There is a claim by Williams that he was not indicted for unlicensed dealing in firearms. It is true that this charge 

was not in the first indictment but Williams seems to have forgotten that he was indicted twice and the second 

indictment did contain the unlicensed dealing offense. So, counsel did not wrongly induce Williams to plead to an 

unindicted charge. I separate this claim for relief because it is not based on failure of defense to object. 

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negotiations and exclusion of time allowed Williams’ counsel to gain a plea agreement that 

benefitted the petitioner. 

 Nor was there anything ineffective in the decision of counsel not to object to the career 

offender guideline calculation. Williams says his counsel got it wrong by not objecting to 

separate counting of two prior state sentences. Separate counting, he argues, cannot be applied 

when the two cases were consolidated for sentencing hearing. His problem is that the Sentencing 

Commission has established that prior sentences are always counted separately if the sentences 

were imposed for offenses separated by an intervening arrest. (U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2). No dispute 

exists that there was, in fact, an intervening arrest between the two state offenses. Petitioner is 

also wrong to argue that a felony counted for career offender status must be assigned more than 

one point. Williams has misread a precedent from another Circuit to argue that one point 

convictions do not count for career status. The fact that the Eighth Circuit referred to the rule 

that predicate career offender prior conviction must have “points” is a generic reference to points 

in general and does not specify any particular number of points required for a predicate status. 

 What this leaves is the place of the Fair Sentencing Act (“FSA”) in this case. Unlike 

some changes in the Guideline rules which tend to apply retroactively, the Fair Sentencing Act 

was not retroactive in this Circuit, at the time of sentencing. Indeed the FSA was not enacted at 

the time of sentence but became law eleven days after sentence.2

 The FSA was not applied 

retroactively in this Circuit. See United States v. Fisher, 635 F.3d 336 (7th Cir. 2011). About 

eleven months later the Supreme Court found that Fisher was wrongly decided. 

 

2

 The FSA raised the amount of crack cocaine that would trigger the mandatory minimum and maximum for a crack 

offense. Williams says he was charged with less than that trigger amount since his indictment charged only 50 

grams but the trigger is an amount proved not merely the amount charged. Williams admitted to accountability for 

559 grams of crack which exceeds the higher amount (280 grams) contained in the FSA. 

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 Williams’ pled guilty on 22 January 2010 and was sentenced on 23 July. He appealed 

and eventually his appellate lawyer advised him to withdraw his notice of appeal. If Williams 

failed to do so, counsel would file an Anders brief. 

Williams complains that his trial and appellate lawyers should have tried to put his case 

on hold until the Supreme Court might rule that the FSA is retroactive. Trial counsel had a very 

short time to seek sentence reduction and the FSA did not pass while the window was open to 

file for a sentence reduction. Based on what was known of the law at the time, I would not have 

permitted Williams to withdraw his plea of guilty since his issues are not with the plea but rather 

the sentence imposed. The appeal counsel could have tried to persuade the Court of Appeals to 

put the appeal on hold until the Supreme Court decided whether the FSA was retroactive. 

There are a handful of cases where courts have put a decision on hold until a specific 

decision is reached in a known specific case. But this is uncommon. I have not found a case in 

which a lawyer has been found ineffective for failure to pursue a strategy based on his knowing 

of the possibility that a pending Supreme Court decision might change the law. The rule runs the 

other way. In a capital case, the Fourth Circuit noted that “the case law is clear that an attorney’s 

assistance is not rendered ineffective because he failed to anticipate a new rule of law.” 

H.Kornahrens III v. Evatt, 66 F.3d 1350 (4th Cir. 1995) (citing cases). 

This issue has a certain inherent interest but, in the end, the FSA is not relevant to this 

case. The FSA did not change the career offender guideline and that is the guideline under 

which he would be sentenced. 

I note finally the claim that trial counsel was ineffective is, in this case, very hard to 

understand in light of the fine job counsel did. Defense counsel’s analysis of the criminal 

history addressed the significant issue that remained in the case after the entry of the plea of 

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guilty. Defense counsel’s well focused advocacy played a significant role in the reduced 

sentence I imposed. 

The motion to vacate, set aside or correct sentence is denied. 

ENTER:

James B. Zagel 

United States District Judge 

DATE: October 2, 2013 

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