Opinion ID: 2827702
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Supreme Court’s Opinion in Richardson

Text: In 1999, the Supreme Court decided Richardson v. United States, yet another case on appeal from this court regarding a section 848 CCE conviction. 526 U.S. 813 (1999). The relevant facts in that case were virtually identical to those in Kramer’s: at trial, “the judge rejected Richardson’s proposal to instruct the jury that it must unanimously agree on which three acts constituted the series of violations. Instead, the judge instructed the jurors that they must unanimously agree that the defendant committed at least three federal narcotics offenses.” Id. at 816 (internal quotations omitted). Richardson challenged that jury instruction. On appeal we held, on one side of a circuit split, that the judge’s instruction was proper. The Supreme Court reversed. It held that “a jury in a federal criminal case brought under § 848 must unanimously agree not only that the defendant committed some ‘continuing series of violations’ but also that the defendant committed each of the individual ‘violations’ necessary to make up that ‘continuing series.’” Id. at 815. In other words, each underlying violation in the continuing series constitutes an element of the CCE offense. 5. Kramer’s 1999 Section 2241 and Section 2255 Motions In light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Richardson, Kramer filed a petition in September of 1999 for a writ of habeas corpus in the Southern District of Illinois, seeking relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, or alternatively, 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The district court ruled on Kramer’s petition in July 2002. See Kramer v. United States, No. 99-Civ-0684-JLF (Jul. 25, 2002, S.D. Ill.). The court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction over 10 No. 14-3049 Kramer’s section 2241 motion. At the time that Kramer filed his petition, he was incarcerated in a federal detention facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. As such, the court held that Kramer should have filed his motion in the Southern District of Indiana. The court found that it lacked jurisdiction under section 2255, as well. A petitioner is required to seek authorization from the court of appeals to file a “second or successive” section 2255 motion. See 28 U.S.C. § 2255, ¶ 8. Without that authorization, the district court lacks jurisdiction over the petition. The district court concluded that Kramer had already pursued one section 2255 motion (the 1997 petition that resulted in the vacatur of his section 846 conviction). Therefore, Kramer was required to obtain permission from this court before pursuing another section 2255 motion. Without that permission, the court concluded, it lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the section 2255 claim. The court dismissed both motions without prejudice. On December 20, 2002, Kramer refiled his petition, again under both sections 2241 and 2255, in the Southern District of Indiana. See Kramer v. Olson, No. 2:02-cv-00317 (Apr. 21, 2003, S.D. Ind.). That court concluded, as had the district court in the Southern District of Illinois, that Kramer’s petition was successive under the language of the statute: Kramer had filed a previous section 2255 motion, and the district court had (in addition to the vacatur) denied him relief on his remaining claims. The district court then concluded that, under the two routes available to him, Kramer did not establish that the statute permitted him to file a successive No. 14-3049 11 section 2255 motion.2 Therefore, the district court concluded that it did not have jurisdiction over Kramer’s motion. Kramer appealed the district court’s dismissal, and we affirmed. See Kramer v. Olson, 347 F.3d 214 (7th Cir. 2003) (per curiam). 6. Magwood and Suggs In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Magwood v. Patterson, the case that forms the basis of Kramer’s current section 2255 motion. 561 U.S. 320 (2010). Billy Joe Magwood was convicted in Alabama state court of killing the Sheriff of Coffee County, and he was sentenced to death. Having exhausted his state remedies, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2254 in the Middle District of Alabama. The district court upheld Magwood’s conviction but vacated his death sentence. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed. The state trial court then held a resentencing hearing, and it again imposed the death penalty. After again exhausting his state court remedies, Magwood filed a section 2254 petition for a writ of habeas corpus, challenging his new death sentence. He argued that his death sentence was unconstitutional, because “he did not have fair warning at the time of 2 See 28 U.S.C. § 2255, ¶ 5 (permitting a petitioner to bring a successive motion when the petitioner meets one of two listed criteria); see also In re Davenport, 147 F.3d 605, 611 (7th Cir. 1998) (establishing circumstances under which the petitioner could invoke section 2255’s “savings clause,” permitting a motion under section 2241); Garza v. Lappin, 253 F.3d 918, 922 (7th Cir. 2001) (same); Taylor v. Gilkey, 314 F.3d 832 (7th Cir. 2002) (same). 12 No. 14-3049 his offense that his conduct would be sufficient to warrant a death sentence under Alabama law.” Id. at 328. Under 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3)(A), a petitioner is required to seek authorization from the court of appeals to file a “second or successive” section 2254 motion.3 Without such authorization, the district court lacks jurisdiction over the petition. The district court, sua sponte, considered whether Magwood’s motion was “second or successive” under section 2244(b)(3)(A). The court concluded that the petition was not successive, and it conditionally granted the motion. The court of appeals disagreed, concluding that Magwood’s petition was successive, and therefore that the district court did not have jurisdiction to entertain the claim. The Supreme Court reversed. On appeal, the government argued that the question of whether a petition was “second or successive” was “claimfocused”. Id. at 331 (internal quotations omitted) (emphasis added). According to the government, “the phrase should be read to reflect a principle that a prisoner is entitled to one, but only one, full and fair opportunity to wage a collateral attack.” Id. The government argued that Magwood’s fairwarning challenge had been available to him from the start: both when he was sentenced to death the first time and during his subsequent collateral review. Magwood failed to raise it then, and the government argued that this failure rendered his petition successive. 3 The same requirements apply to motions under both section 2254 and section 2255. No. 14-3049 13 The Court rejected the government’s reading of section 2244(b)(3)(A). Noting that “second or successive” is a term of art in the habeas context, the Court turned to the phrase’s statutory context to interpret it. It concluded that “second or successive” refers to the state court judgment being challenged. And in Magwood’s case, he was challenging a judgment that had not been the subject of his first 2254 motion. His first death sentence, the subject of his prior section 2254 motion, had been vacated. The judgment that he now challenged was the death sentence that had been subsequently imposed, after a new sentencing hearing. Therefore, the Court concluded, Magwood’s petition was not successive. Just prior to concluding its opinion, the Court stated the following: The State objects that our reading of § 2244(b) would allow a petitioner who obtains a conditional writ as to his sentence to file a subsequent application challenging not only his resulting, new sen- tence, but also his original, undisturbed conviction. The State believes this result follows because a sentence and conviction form a single “judgment” for purposes of habeas review. This case gives us no occasion to address that question, because Mag- wood has not attempted to challenge his underly- ing conviction. We base our conclusion on the text, and that text is not altered by consequences the State speculates will follow in another case. Id. at 342 (emphasis in original). This language would be critical to our application of Magwood in Suggs v. United States, 705 F.3d 279 (7th Cir. 2013). 14 No. 14-3049 In Suggs, defendant Alonzo Suggs was convicted of a federal drug offense and sentenced to 300 months in prison. Under section 2255, Suggs challenged his sentence, arguing that he received ineffective assistance of counsel regarding his sentencing guideline calculations. He succeeded: his sentence was vacated, and he was subsequently resentenced to 240 months in prison. After his resentencing, Suggs obtained new information that he claimed established his innocence. He requested permission from this court to bring a second section 2255 motion, so that he could challenge his conviction in light of the newly-discovered evidence. We denied his request. He then filed a new motion under section 2255 in the district court. He argued that his motion “should not be barred as ‘second or successive’ because his resentencing imposed a new judgment such that his new motion under section 2255 should not be barred.” Id. at 281. So, the Suggs facts seemed to present precisely the question that the Supreme Court noted, without deciding, in Magwood: Suggs sought to challenge his underlying conviction, which had been undisturbed by the vacatur of his prior sentence and his resentencing. Did this constitute a “new judgment” under Magwood? If so, his section 2255 motion would be not be considered successive. Prior to Magwood, our circuit precedent had established that “such motions after resentencing are not second or successive when they allege errors made during the resentencing, but they are second or successive when they challenge the underlying conviction. Id. at 282 (citing Dahler v. United States, 259 F.3d 763 (7th Cir. 2001)). Suggs argued, however, that the reasoning upon which Dahler was based could not No. 14-3049 15 have survived Magwood. He contended that he should be permitted to challenge his underlying conviction as a first section 2255 motion. We disagreed. We concluded that “because Magwood expressly declined to extend its holding to the facts before us here, it did not disturb our circuit’s precedent, Dahler, which applies to Suggs’ motion and required the district court to dismiss it as second or successive.” Suggs, 705 F.3d at 282–83. We held that “Magwood’s application to these facts is not sufficiently clear for us to abandon principles of stare decisis based on what the Supreme Court itself called ‘speculation’ about how the Court would rule on an issue it expressly