Opinion ID: 2810983
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The District Court’s Response

Text: The district court construed the Motion as a request under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(d)(3), which acknowledges a district court’s inherent authority to set aside a judgment for fraud on the court. The district court also appointed counsel for Mr. Williams, ordered the parties to conduct discovery, and held an evidentiary hearing, which was conducted intermittently between May 2012 and June 2012.3 At the hearing, the district court received testimony from multiple witnesses who supported Mr. Williams’s claims that the Tulsa police officers acted fraudulently during the investigation of his case. The district court issued an opinion and order vacating Mr. Williams’s judgment and sentence and dismissing the third superseding indictment. In so doing, the district court found that Tulsa Police Department officers committed a fraud on the court that required Mr. Williams’s convictions to be set aside. In the alternative, the court granted Mr. Williams’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea based on the court’s common law authority to prevent a miscarriage of justice, specifically finding that Mr. Williams had demonstrated actual innocence by a preponderance of the evidence. To distinguish an intervening decision of this court, United States v. Baker, 718 F.3d 1204 (10th Cir. 2013),4 which held that motions alleging fraud on the court should be treated as second or 3 The government filed a motion for permission to file an interlocutory appeal with this court, challenging the district court’s order, but we denied the government permission to appeal. 4 We discuss our decision in Baker in more detail later in this opinion. See infra Part III.B.1.b. 7 successive petitions, the district court explained that “it is the Court, not the defendant, that has invoked its inherent authority and has construed Mr. Williams’[s] motion to Withdraw and Nullify Guilty Plea as a fraud on the court motion.” United States v. Williams, 16 F. Supp. 3d 1301, 1313 n.5 (N.D. Okla. 2014). The district court entered its order on April 18, 2014, and the government filed an appeal of that decision on June 16, 2014. In response, Mr. Williams filed a motion in this court seeking to dismiss the government’s appeal as untimely.5