Todd Harold Cooper v. United States

In Johnson v. United States, 576 U.S. 591, 597–98 (2015), this Court established a new rule of constitutional law that invalidates vague, statutory residual clauses that impose recidivist punishments by combining the categorical approach to prior-conviction analysis with imprecise risk standards. The rule is retroactive to cases on collateral review, Welch v. United States, 578 U.S. 120, 130 (2016), and this Court has applied it to invalidate several residual clauses, see Sessions v. Dimaya, 584 U.S. 148, 152 (2018); United States v. Davis, 588 U.S. 445, 470 (2019). The federal three-strikes law contains the same kind of vague residual clause, 18 U.S.C. § 3559(c)(2)(F)(ii), which the Government concedes is unconstitutional. The federal courts of appeals, however, are deeply divided over what a movant under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 must prove to obtain collateral relief under Johnson’s new rule. The question presented is: What must a § 2255 movant show as to reliance on an unconstitutional residual clause to receive relief under Johnson?