Opinion ID: 68848
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Insufficient Charge in Count 8

Text: Brown also claims that his conviction on Count 8 is invalid because the indictment failed to allege a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). A defendant violates section 924(c) if he (1) “during and in relation to any . . . drug trafficking crime . . . uses or carries a firearm” or (2) “in furtherance of any such crime, possesses a firearm.” 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(A). Count 8 alleged that Brown “during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime . . . did knowingly possess a firearm.” Brown contends that the indictment failed to charge a § 924(c) offense because it combined the “during and in relation to” part of the first prong of § 924(c)(1)(A) with the “possesses a firearm” part of the second prong of § 924(c)(1)(A).11 It is clear that Count 8 of the indictment was defective in that it did not correctly state the elements of a § 924(c) offense. The question here is whether 10 We deny the government’s January 16, 2009 motion to dismiss Brown’s appeal. 11 As noted earlier, we review de novo questions of subject matter jurisdiction. Moore, 443 F.3d at 793. 16 that defect invalidates Brown’s guilty plea to Count 8. Before we can address that issue, however, we must first determine whether Brown waived this indictmentdefect argument by pleading guilty. An unconditional guilty plea waives all nonjurisdictional challenges to a defendant’s conviction. United States v. Betancourth, 554 F.3d 1329, 1332 (11th Cir. 2009). Brown argues that an indictment’s failure to allege a federal offense is a jurisdictional defect that cannot be waived. To resolve Brown’s argument, we review the decisions in United States v. Cotton, 535 U.S. 625, 122 S. Ct. 1781 (2002), and United States v. Peter, 310 F.3d 709 (11th Cir. 2002), which clarified that not all defects in an indictment are jurisdictional. In Cotton, the indictment charged the defendants with two drug crimes but did not allege a drug quantity. 535 U.S. at 627-28, 122 S. Ct. at 1783. The district court made a drug quantity finding that increased the statutory maximum sentences and sentenced the defendants accordingly. Id. at 628, 122 S. Ct. at 1784. The Supreme Court addressed whether the omission from the indictment of a fact that increased the statutory maximum sentence, i.e., the drug quantity, was a jurisdictional defect. Id. at 629, 122 S. Ct. at 1784. In Cotton, the Supreme Court explained that the view that indictment defects were jurisdictional derived from Ex parte Bain, 121 U.S. 1, 7 S. Ct. 781 (1887), and was “a product of an era in which this Court’s authority to review criminal 17 convictions was greatly circumscribed.” Cotton, 535 U.S. at 629, 122 S. Ct. at 1784. “The Court’s desire to correct obvious constitutional violations led to a somewhat expansive notion of jurisdiction, which was more a fiction than anything else.” Id. at 629, 122 S. Ct. at 1784-85 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The Supreme Court assessed that “Bain’s elastic concept of jurisdiction is not what the term ‘jurisdiction’ means today, i.e., the courts’ statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate the case.” Id. at 630, 122 S. Ct. at 1786 (internal quotation marks omitted). After reviewing its precedent after Bain, the Supreme Court stated that “this Court some time ago departed from Bain’s view that indictment defects are ‘jurisdictional’” and concluded that “[i]nsofar as it held that a defective indictment deprives a court of jurisdiction, Bain is overruled.” Id. at 631, 122 S. Ct. at 1785. This Court then applied Cotton in United States v. Peter, 310 F.3d 709 (11th Cir. 2002). In Peter, we noted that the Supreme Court rejected the view that all indictment defects are jurisdictional and that this Court had distinguished between indictment omissions (such as failing to allege an element of an offense) and indictments that affirmatively alleged conduct that either is not proscribed by the charging statute or is beyond the sweep of the charging statute. 310 F.3d at 713-14 (discussing our prior decisions in United States v. Tomeny, 144 F.3d 749 (11th Cir. 18 1998), McCoy v. United States, 266 F.3d 1245 (11th Cir. 2001), and United States v. Sanchez, 269 F.3d 1250 (11th Cir. 2001) (en banc)). Defendant Peter’s guilty plea to conspiring to violate the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) and the predicate crime of mail fraud was based on his admission that he made misrepresentations in license applications that he mailed to a Florida state agency. Id. at 711. Because mail fraud offenses require that the object of the fraud be property and state licenses do not constitute such property, the defendant argued that his RICO conviction was invalid because his conduct was not a crime under the predicate mail fraud statute. Id. In Peter, this Court agreed with the defendant that “the Government affirmatively alleged a specific course of conduct [i.e., mailing state license applications containing misrepresentations] that is outside the reach of the mail fraud statute.” Id. at 715. Thus, the indictment charged a non-offense. Id. In Peter, we also pointed out that in Cotton “the prosecution’s evidence had been ‘overwhelming and essentially uncontroverted’ on the very point of fact which the indictment had erroneously failed to allege.” Id. at 714 (quoting Cotton, 535 U.S. at 633, 122 S. Ct. at 1786). In Brown’s case, the indictment defect was an omission of an element of the charged crime and not an affirmative allegation of conduct beyond the reach of the 19 charging statute. As an initial matter, Count 8 specifically referred to 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) and thus provided Brown with adequate notice of the charge against him. See United States v. Fern, 155 F.3d 1318, 1325 (11th Cir. 1998) (“If an indictment specifically refers to the statute on which the charge was based, the reference to the statutory language adequately informs the defendant of the charge.”); United States v. Stefan, 784 F.2d 1093, 1101-02 (11th Cir. 1986) (“[W]hen the indictment specifically refers to the statute on which the charge was based, the statutory language may be used to determine whether the defendant received adequate notice.”). And, importantly, at the plea hearing, Brown admitted to conduct that established the omitted element of the charged crime. The government proffered these facts, which Brown admitted: (1) the government arranged a controlled drug transaction through Gwendolyn Brown, a woman to whom Brown previously had sold drugs; (2) immediately after the phone call with Gwendolyn Brown, officers saw Brown leave his apartment with a paper bag and enter his car; (3) officers stopped Brown in his vehicle just before he got to the interstate exit where Gwendolyn Brown was supposed to be waiting; and (4) a search of Brown’s vehicle recovered the paper bag he had been seen carrying, which contained about 725 grams of powder cocaine, and a Taurus 357 caliber revolver. This conduct 20 clearly falls within and establishes both of § 924(c)’s prongs. See United States v. Timmons, 283 F.3d 1246 (11th Cir. 2002) (concluding evidence that defendant carried a shoe-box containing a firearm and drugs to an arranged transaction was sufficient to show he “carried” the firearm “during and in relation to” a drug trafficking crime and that the bulletproof vest, crack cocaine, loaded firearms, and ammunition seized from defendant’s home was sufficient to show that he possessed the firearms “in furtherance of” drug trafficking); United States v. Wilson, 183 F.3d 1291, 1295-96 (11th Cir. 1999) (concluding evidence was sufficient to support a § 924(c) conviction where defendant was arrested in a vehicle containing two bottles of crack cocaine under the front seats and had a pistol on the dashboard); United States v. Range, 94 F.3d 614, 617 (11th Cir. 1996) (concluding evidence was sufficient to support a § 924(c) conviction where the defendant was arrested in the process of an arranged cocaine transaction and a loaded pistol and bag containing $40,000 in cash was found under the mat by the front seat of his vehicle). Thus, the particular indictment omission in this § 924(c) case did not deprive the district court of power to adjudicate Brown’s case or to accept Brown’s guilty plea. Rather, the indictment defect here is non-jurisdictional and was waived by 21 Brown’s guilty plea.12