Jacobs v. United States
| Decision Date | 28 October 2021 |
| Docket Number | 20-5761 |
| Parties | ELISHA JACOBS, Petitioner-Appellant, v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Respondent-Appellee. |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit) |
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION
ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF KENTUCKY
Before: MOORE, KETHLEDGE, and DONALD, Circuit Judges.
Elisha Jacobs, a federal prisoner proceeding through counsel appeals the district court's denial of his motion to vacate, set aside, or correct sentence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. Jacobs' motion challenges his two convictions under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), arguing that each predicate offense supporting those convictions can no longer be considered a "crime of violence" after the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Davis, 139 S.Ct. 2319 (2019). Davis, however, nullified the residual clause definition of "crime of violence" in § 924(c)(3)(B) but did not invalidate the elements clause definition in § 924(c)(3)(A). Given that Jacobs' § 924(c) convictions remain valid under the elements clause, we affirm.
We set forth a detailed factual background of this case when we decided Jacobs' direct appeal more than twenty years ago. United States v. Jacobs, 244 F.3d 503, 505-06 (6th Cir. 2001). Accordingly, we will incorporate by reference our earlier opinion and repeat only those background facts necessary for our discussion of the issues raised in Jacobs' current appeal.
In sum, Jacobs twice abducted his then-wife Lauretta in 1997 after she and her children moved from the couple's Kentucky home to Indiana. The first abduction occurred in February 1997 when Jacobs asked Lauretta to come to his parents' house in Kentucky to get some money for living expenses. Lauretta testified that when she arrived, Jacobs grabbed her, choked her, and hit her in the face, breaking three of her teeth and cutting her lip. Armed with a loaded shotgun and knife, Jacobs then forced Lauretta into his truck and made her drive to a motel in Tennessee. There, Lauretta had sex with Jacobs because she was afraid he would kill her if she refused. After Jacobs returned Lauretta to Kentucky the next day, she reported the abduction to police and went to a hospital to treat her injuries.
The second abduction occurred in April 1997, following Jacobs' arrest for kidnapping and aggravated assault and eventual release on bond. Undeterred by the release order restricting him from contacting Lauretta, Jacobs immediately drove to her Indiana trailer home. He then climbed through Lauretta's window at night brandishing a gun, and dragged her out of the trailer, across cornfields, and over a barbed wire fence, cutting her leg. Jacobs continued beating Lauretta and forced her into the woods where he became lost and eventually went to sleep. Lauretta was able to escape, and Jacobs was arrested and charged with several state felonies. He pled guilty in Indiana state court to criminal confinement and was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment, concurrent with any sentence he received in federal court.
Jacobs was then charged in a federal indictment, tried, and convicted on the following seven counts related to the two abductions: (1) kidnapping, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1201; (2) interstate domestic violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2261(a)(2); (3) use of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c); (4) interstate violation of protection order, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2262; (5) interstate domestic violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2261(a)(1); (6) unlawful possession of a firearm while under court order, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8); and (7) use of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). The first four counts related to the Tennessee abduction and the remaining three counts related to the Indiana abduction. Jacobs received concurrent 70-month sentences for each of the non-§ 924(c) counts, a consecutive sentence of 60 months on the first § 924(c) count (Count 3), and an additional consecutive sentence of 240 months on the second § 924(c) count (Count 7).[1] This Court affirmed Jacobs' conviction and sentence on direct appeal. Jacobs, 244 F.3d at 508.
Twenty years later, Jacobs filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 seeking to vacate his § 924(c) convictions in Counts 3 and 7 based on the Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Davis, 139 S.Ct. 2319 (2019). For context, § 924(c) carries a mandatory consecutive prison sentence for anyone who "during and in relation to a crime of violence . . . uses or carries a firearm." 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(A). Section 924(c)(3) defines the term "crime of violence" as a felony offense that:
18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3). In 2019, Davis held that that the "residual clause" in § 924(c)(3)(B) is unconstitutionally vague, meaning that a § 924(c) conviction remains valid only if the underlying predicate offense qualifies as a "crime of violence" under the "elements clause" in § 924(c)(3)(A).[2]See 139 S.Ct. at 2336.
Relying on Davis, Jacobs claims that his § 924(c) convictions are invalid because the underlying predicate offenses supporting those convictions do not have "as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force" to qualify as crimes of violence under the elements clause in § 924(c)(3)(A). The magistrate judge agreed and recommended that Jacobs' § 924(c) convictions be vacated, but the district court rejected that recommendation and denied Jacobs' motion. This appeal followed.
Section 2255 provides that a federal prisoner may move to vacate, set aside, or correct his sentence if, among other things, the sentence "was imposed in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States, . . . or is otherwise subject to collateral attack[.]" 28 U.S.C. § 2255(a). The petitioner in a § 2255 proceeding bears the burden of proof by a preponderance of the evidence. United States v. Brown, 957 F.3d 679, 690 (6th Cir. 2020).
In reviewing a district court's denial of a § 2255 motion, we apply a clearly erroneous standard to its factual findings and review de novo its legal conclusions. Hyatt v. United States, 207 F.3d 831, 832 (6th Cir. 2000). One of the legal conclusions we review de novo is whether a crime constitutes a "crime of violence" under § 924(c). United States v. Jackson, 918 F.3d 467, 484 (6th Cir. 2019).
The government argues as a threshold matter that we should automatically affirm because the district court judge, the same judge who oversaw Jacobs' trial and instructed the jury in 1999, asserted in his order denying Jacobs' § 2255 motion that "[i]t is clear from the jury instructions and the government's briefings that Jacobs was not convicted under the residual clause of § 924(c)." Based on this assertion, the government contends that Jacobs' motion is procedurally improper because Davis only applies retroactively to convictions or sentences that rely on the residual clause. While we would normally defer to the district court's assertion when analyzing a second or successive § 2255 petition, see Potter v. United States, 887 F.3d 785, 788 (6th Cir. 2018), we have explicitly "rejected the Government's implied premise that a first-time § 2255 movant must show that the sentencing court relied only on the residual clause in order for the movant to bring a" Davis-like claim. Chaney v. United States, 917 F.3d 895, 899 (6th Cir. 2019). Thus, instead of relying solely on what the district court said in an opinion twenty years after Jacobs, a first-time § 2255 movant, was convicted, we believe the more appropriate procedure is to decide this case on the merits.
Here, the parties agree that the purported "crime of violence" underlying Jacobs' § 924(c) charge in Count 3 was interstate domestic violence under § 2261(a)(2), and the predicate for his § 924(c) charge in Count 7 was interstate domestic violence under § 2261(a)(1).[3] The issue on appeal is whether those predicate offenses still qualify as § 924(c) crimes of violence after Davis.
It is well settled that we employ the "categorical approach" to determine whether Jacobs' interstate domestic violence convictions each constitute a crime of violence under § 924(c)(3)'s elements clause. United States v. Rafidi, 829 F.3d 437, 444 (6th Cir. 2016). The categorical approach prohibits us from considering how an offender may have violated the statute in a particular circumstance, and instead requires us to focus solely on the statutory definition (i.e., the elements) of the offense. Id. Based on the elements alone, we then determine whether "every defendant convicted of that . . . felony must have used, attempted to use, or threatened to use physical force against the person of another in order to have been convicted[.]"[4] United States v. Burris, 912 F.3d 386, 392 (6th Cir. 2019). If the answer to that question is "yes" because even the least serious act criminalized by the statute involves physical force, then a conviction under that statute is categorically a crime of violence under § 924(c). See id.
We take a slightly different approach for divisible statutes. A statute is considered "divisible" if it "lists multiple elements disjunctively," as distinguished from a statute that merely "enumerates various factual means of committing a single element." Mathis v. United States, 136 S.Ct. 2243, 2249 (2016); see also Descamps v. United States, 570 U.S. 254, 257 (20...
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