Rico Blackwell v. United States

Mr. Blackwell is serving a long federal prison sentence for the paired crimes of conspiracy to commit bank robbery and use of a firearm during and relation to a crime of violence in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). After this Court’s opinion in United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2336 (2019), in which it struck down § 924(c)’s residual clause, we know that Mr. Blackwell’s conspiracy crime is no longer a crime of violence and, consequently, the § 924(c) violation is no longer a crime. The government disputes none of this. All agree, then, that Mr. Blackwell stands convicted and sentenced—to a term of 84 months in prison consecutive to the penalty for the conspiracy crime alone—for a noncrime. Yet the district court denied Mr. Blackwell’s post-Davis 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion anyway. It did so based not upon the merits, but instead upon two procedural questions— procedural default and a collateral-attack waiver in the plea agreement—questions we now present to this Court: 1. At least four circuit courts have held that a postconviction challenge to a conviction or sentence based upon one of this Court’s trio of residual-clause holdings— Johnson, Dimaya, and Davis—cannot be procedurally defaulted. The Eleventh Circuit recently became the first to say otherwise. With this circuit split in place, we ask the Court answer this question: Whether a defendant can ever show cause and prejudice to avoid the procedural default bar on a meritorious Davis challenge to a § 924(c) conviction? 2. The district court enforced the long-ago collateralattack waiver and a single judge of the Eleventh Circuit denied Mr. Blackwell a certificate of appealability. Here, too, there is a circuit split, for at least one circuit has held that a Davis-based § 2255 claim is exempted from a general waiver, and at least one has not. We ask this Court to decide this query: Whether the collateral-attack waiver in the plea agreement bars Mr. Blackwell’s Davis challenge to his § 924(c) conviction in spite of the fact that he is actually innocent and that the sentence—which exceeds the statutory maximum—is a miscarriage of justice?