Pilla v. United States

• Decision Date: 06 February 2012
• Docket Number: No. 10–4178.,10–4178.
• Citation: 668 F.3d 368
• Parties: Ramani PILLA, Petitioner–Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Respondent–Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

668 F.3d 368

Ramani PILLA, Petitioner–Appellant,

v.UNITED STATES of America, Respondent–Appellee.

No. 10–4178.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: June 1, 2011.Decided and Filed: Feb. 6, 2012.

ARGUED: Michael A. Partlow, Morganstern, MacAdams & DeVito Co., L.P.A., Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Laura McMullen Ford, Assistant United States Attorney, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Michael A. Partlow, Morganstern, MacAdams & DeVito Co., L.P.A., Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Laura McMullen Ford, Assistant United States Attorney, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellee.Before: BOGGS and KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judges; COLLIER, Chief District Judge.^*

OPINION

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge.

Ramani Pilla, a citizen and native of India, was removed from the United States after pleading guilty to making false, misleading, or fraudulent statements to the FBI, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. She now seeks a writ of coram nobis, which is an extraordinary writ sometimes available to federal convicts who have already completed their prison term. She claims her trial counsel was ineffective because he gave her bad advice about the immigration consequences of her guilty plea. The district court denied the writ. We affirm.

I.

While employed as an assistant professor at Case Western University, Pilla told the FBI—and the university—that she had received several pieces of hate mail at her university office. The FBI and the university spent thousands of dollars investigating Pilla's report before she admitted to writing and delivering the hate mail herself. After Pilla pled guilty to violating 18 U.S.C. § 1001, she was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to pay more than $66,000 in restitution.

Steven Bell represented Pilla during her criminal case. He encouraged Pilla to plead guilty after the government provided him with overwhelming evidence of her guilt. The evidence included still frames from a surveillance camera that showed Pilla sliding letters under her office door, copies of the FBI report documenting Pilla's own confession to the hoax, and a CD of “telephone conversations or voice mails” between Pilla and an FBI agent. Bell later testified that, after conducting extensive research, he thought “the likelihood of having [Pilla's] confession suppressed [was] close to zero.”

So Bell researched potential defenses consistent with the confession. In particular, he considered a diminished-capacity defense based upon Pilla's alleged mental illness and her addiction to a drug called Klonopin. Although Bell found two psychiatrists to examine Pilla, each of them refused to testify in support of this defense. Bell also interviewed an expert whom Pilla herself proposed—a medical doctor and ex-colleague of Pilla's—but he likewise refused to testify. Pilla also suggested another defense altogether—that someone had broken into her house and written the letters on her laptop—but Bell rejected it because “the story didn't have any credibility” and a forensic examination of Pilla's computer would have been too expensive. Bell ultimately advised Pilla that she would probably receive a shorter prison sentence if she pled guilty rather than proceeding to trial.

Pilla is not a United States citizen, so Bell considered whether a guilty plea might have immigration consequences for her. He consulted a statute discussing deportation of non-citizens convicted of “aggravated felonies,” but decided it was “over [his] head, well beyond [his] expertise.” Thus he contacted Robert Brown, an immigration attorney who had previously served as an acting regional director for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Bell described the case to Brown and later sent him copies of the Bill of Information and the government's restitution calculations. Bell, Brown, and Pilla thereafter discussed whether the charged conduct would constitute an aggravated felony for immigration purposes. Brown said that “the charge to which Dr. Pilla was going to in all likelihood enter a guilty plea was not an aggravated felony,” meaning that she would not necessarily be deported upon her conviction.

Brown's advice turned out to be incorrect. An immigration judge determined that Pilla's offense was, in fact, an aggravated felony and that she was therefore removable under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(iii). The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed and dismissed Pilla's appeal. In a companion case to this one, we have agreed with the immigration judge and the Board. See Pilla v. Holder, No. 09–4577.

While in federal prison, Pilla challenged her sentence—but not her plea or conviction—in a motion for habeas corpus relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The district court denied the motion. Pilla then sought permission to file a second § 2255 motion. We denied her request because Pilla could not satisfy the second-or-successive requirements set forth in § 2255(h).

In September 2009, after completing her prison sentence, Pilla filed a petition for a writ of coram nobis in the district court. In the petition, she argued that Bell was ineffective for failing to advise her that a guilty plea would result in automatic deportation. The district court allowed discovery and granted both parties several extensions of time to file supplemental briefing. Following a status conference, the court gave Pilla's attorney until August 13, 2010 to file a supplemental brief. He did not file the document in time: instead, he waited until fifteen minutes after the deadline and then requested a two-week extension. The court granted him one week. When her attorney missed that deadline as well, the court issued a thorough opinion denying Pilla's petition. Pilla's counsel thereafter filed a motion for relief from judgment and attached a supplemental memorandum. The court reviewed the memo, found that it would not have changed the decision, and denied the motion.

This appeal followed.

II.

We review the district court's denial of a writ of coram nobis de novo, but uphold the court's factual findings unless they are clearly erroneous. Blanton v. United States, 94 F.3d 227, 230 (6th Cir.1996).

Coram nobis is an extraordinary writ that may be used to “vacate a federal sentence or conviction when a § 2255 motion is unavailable—generally, when the petitioner has served his sentence completely and thus is no longer in custody[.]” Id. at 231. We grant the writ only if the petitioner demonstrates a factual error that was unknown at the time of trial and that is “of a fundamentally unjust character which probably would have altered the outcome of the challenged proceeding if it had been known.” United States v. Johnson, 237 F.3d 751, 755 (6th Cir.2001).

A.

Pilla's claim in seeking the writ—that Bell provided constitutionally ineffective assistance with respect to her plea—is one that she could have raised in her § 2255 motion. One might argue, therefore, that we should treat her petition for a writ of coram nobis as a second or successive motion for relief under § 2255. The Seventh Circuit has held that “[a]ny motion filed in the district court that imposed the sentence, and substantively within the scope of § 2255 ¶ 1, is a motion under § 2255, no matter what title the prisoner plasters on the cover.” Melton v. United States, 359 F.3d 855, 857 (7th Cir.2004) (Easterbrook, J.) (emphasis in original). The Supreme Court has likewise adopted a functional approach in determining whether a motion counts as a successive application for relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. See Calderon v. Thompson, 523 U.S. 538, 553, 118 S.Ct. 1489, 140 L.Ed.2d 728 (1998) (“In a § 2254 case, a prisoner's motion to recall the mandate on the basis of the merits of the underlying decision can be regarded as a second or successive application for purposes of § 2244(b)”).

We agree with the Seventh Circuit's holding in Melton. If, in substance, a claim falls within the scope of § 2255(a), it should be treated as such regardless of any “inventive captioning” by the prisoner. Melton, 359 F.3d at 857. But part of the substance of a § 2255 motion is that it is filed by “[a] prisoner in custody under sentence of a court established by Act of Congress[.]” 28 U.S.C. § 2255(a) (emphasis added); see also Melton, 359 F.3d at 857. That is why the courts do not consider the merits of § 2255 motions filed by persons no longer in custody. See Blan...