Opinion ID: 4574290
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Elijah Jones

Text: On the evening of January 10, 2018, two police officers patrolling the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami spotted Jones standing by a car’s passenger-side window and speaking to the driver. One officer executed a U-turn in his marked vehicle to tell the driver he was displaying a parking permit incorrectly. As the officer turned his car around, he saw Jones look at the marked vehicle, pull a dark object from his waistband, and toss it inside the car before walking away. On arrival, the officers found a loaded gun on the car’s passenger-side floorboard. After detaining Jones and warning him of his rights, see Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444–45 (1966), an officer asked Jones if the firearm was his. Jones said it belonged to his girlfriend. The officer then asked if the firearm was in Jones’s possession. Jones denied possessing the gun. Asked a second time, he admitted to possessing the gun. The officer confirmed Jones was a felon and arrested him. 4 USCA11 Case: 19-10112 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 5 of 17 A grand jury returned a single-count indictment charging Jones with possessing a firearm as a felon, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Like Innocent’s indictment, Jones’s indictment did not allege Jones knew he was a felon or cite section 924(a)(2). Like Innocent, Jones did not challenge the indictment on that basis. Instead, he raises that challenge for the first time on appeal. Although Jones’s trial did not focus on whether he knew he was a felon, several moments bore on that issue. During its opening statement, the government explained that, “[a]s [Jones] saw [the two] police cars approach him, he dropped the gun into the passenger side of that vehicle. The defendant knew he was a convicted felon and knew he couldn’t possess a firearm or even a single round of ammunition, but he had a loaded gun with 15 rounds of ammunition.” The jury heard testimony that Jones told the officers on the scene that he was a felon. Jones also stipulated to being a felon. And during closing argument, the government noted that Jones’s decision to quickly discard the gun when officers approached suggested that he knew he was not allowed to possess it. Last, the government sought permission to introduce evidence of Jones’s previous Florida felon-inpossession conviction, but the judge denied the motion because the evidence would have been unnecessarily prejudicial based on the other evidence of Jones’s felon status. 5 USCA11 Case: 19-10112 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 6 of 17 The jury convicted Jones, and the district court sentenced him to 180 months of imprisonment and four years of supervised release based on the 15-year mandatory minimum imposed by the Armed Career Criminal Act for defendants who have previously committed at least three violent felonies or serious drug crimes. 18 U.S.C. § 924(e). Jones had three such convictions: one for aggravated assault with a firearm, Fla. Stat. § 784.021; one for resisting an officer with violence, id. § 843.01; and one for selling drugs at a school, id. § 893.13(1)(c). During his sentencing hearing, Jones conceded that all three convictions counted as qualifying offenses under the Act. His attorney explained that he “wanted to” object to the guideline calculation. Specifically, he said he “would have loved to file” an objection arguing that Jones did “not qualify as an armed career criminal.” But after he “researched and researched and researched and researched,” he couldn’t find a ground to object to viewing “the aggravated assault [with] a firearm [conviction] from 2000” as a violent felony. “[T]he 11th Circuit,” he explained, “has found that aggravated assault with a firearm, that’s a crime of violence. So [he] couldn’t object to that.” He reaffirmed that he had “consulted with other people in [his] office” and couldn’t identify “a good-faith basis to file any” objections. “And I think, unfortunately,” he concluded, “it looks like the calculations are correct that [Jones] does qualify. . . . I don’t like it. But I couldn’t file a legal objection[.]”At the end of the hearing, when the judge asked if there 6 USCA11 Case: 19-10112 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 7 of 17 were any objections to the sentence he had imposed, Jones reiterated, “[F]or sentencing purposes, we don’t have any objections to the sentencing.”