| Hollis v. United States |
| Docket: 19-11323 Opinion Date: May 6, 2020 Judge: Per Curiam Areas of Law: Criminal Law |
| The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of petitioner's motion to vacate his sentence under 28 U.S.C. 2255. The court held that petitioner cannot prove that his counsel rendered ineffective assistance, because petitioner's prior convictions in Alabama categorically qualify as predicate offenses under both the Armed Career Criminal Act and the career-offender provision of the Guidelines, and his prior conviction in Georgia qualifies as a predicate offense under the Act. Therefore, counsel did not perform deficiently by failing to raise a meritless objection. |
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| United States v. Evans |
| Docket: 17-15323 Opinion Date: May 6, 2020 Judge: Grant Areas of Law: Criminal Law |
| The Eleventh Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction and sentence for being a felon in possession of a firearm. The court held that, given the totality of the circumstances, it was reasonable for officers, mistaking a dog's whimper for a person in distress, to enter defendant's home without a warrant. Therefore, defendant's challenge to the district court's denial of his motion to suppress evidence failed. The court upheld the district court's imposition of a 22 offense level finding because defendant possessed a semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting a large capacity magazine under USSG 2K2.1(a)(3)(A)(i) (2016). The court also upheld defendant's sentencing enhancement under USSG 2K2.1(b)(4)(B) for possessing a rifle that had an obliterated serial number. |
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| United States v. McLellan |
| Docket: 18-13289 Opinion Date: May 6, 2020 Judge: Boggs Areas of Law: Criminal Law |
| The Eleventh Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction for two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in permitting one of his arresting officers to offer testimony at trial on the correlation between guns and drug activity and to suggest that defendant was selling drugs; the court declined to evaluate the applicability of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), because the district court would have imposed the same sentence regardless of whether the mandatory minimum applied; and the court rejected defendant's claim under Rehaif v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 2191 (2019), and held that there was no plain error in the district court's failure to instruct the jury of the knowledge-of-status element and any error from the lack of a knowledge-of-status element in defendant's plea colloquy did not affect his substantial rights. Finally, the court remanded for clarification of the judgment to reflect the sentence the district court said it would have imposed if the Armed Career Criminal Act did not apply. |
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| Welch v. United States |
| Docket: 14-15733 Opinion Date: May 6, 2020 Judge: Per Curiam Areas of Law: Criminal Law |
| The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of petitioner's 28 U.S.C. 2255 motion to vacate his sentence. The court held that defendant's prior 1996 Florida convictions for robbery qualified as violent felonies under the Armed Career Criminal Act's (ACCA) elements clause, and rejected his contention that the court's decision in his direct appeal carved out a narrow exception to pre-1997 Florida robbery convictions obtained in Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal. The court also held that petitioner's prior Florida felony battery conviction was a violent felony under the ACCA in light of the court's holding in United States v. Vail-Bailon, 868 F.3d 1293 (11th Cir. 2017) (en banc), cert. denied, 138 S. Ct. 2620 (2018). |
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