U.S. v. Rocha

• Decision Date: 03 April 1997
• Docket Number: No. 95-11229,95-11229
• Citation: 109 F.3d 225
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Ruben ROCHA, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 225

109 F.3d 225

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Ruben ROCHA, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 95-11229.

United States Court of Appeals,

Fifth Circuit.

April 3, 1997.

Lynn V. Hastings, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Dallas, TX, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Ruben Rocha, Seagoville, TX, pro se.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Before DAVIS, SMITH and DUHE, Circuit Judges.

JERRY E. SMITH, Circuit Judge:

Ruben Rocha appeals the denial of his 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion for habeas corpus relief. We affirm.

I.

In the fall of 1988, a drug dealer named Thomas Padilla agreed to sell cocaine on consignment: He was to give Tony Rodriguez thirty kilos of the drug, and Rodriguez was to sell it, paying Padilla later from the proceeds. The plan went awry when Rodriguez proved unable to sell the cocaine at a price sufficient to cover his obligation. Fearing Padilla, Rodriguez disappeared.

Desperate to enforce his illegal contract, Padilla conspired with Johnny Hinojosa to kidnap Rodriguez's nephew, Michael Baker. The two abducted Baker and drove him from River Rouge, Michigan, to Dallas, Texas, stopping briefly along the way to telephone Baker's mother and inform her that Baker would be killed if Rodriguez failed to pay his debt.

Upon arriving in Dallas, they enlisted the help of Rocha, who variously guarded Baker, negotiated with Rodriguez, and otherwise assisted Padilla in arranging the payoff. The FBI eventually arrested Rocha and an accomplice as they drove away from a phone where they had been attempting to contact Rodriguez. A search of the vehicle in which the two were captured revealed a loaded revolver under Rocha's seat.

II.

Rocha was convicted of aiding and abetting kidnapping in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(1)-(2), conspiracy to commit extortion in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1951, aiding and abetting extortion in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1951-1952, and using or carrying a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). We affirmed his conviction and sentence on direct appeal. See United States v. Rocha, 916 F.2d 219 (5th Cir.1990), cert. denied, 500 U.S. 934, 111 S.Ct. 2057, 114 L.Ed.2d 462 (1991).

In 1995, Rocha filed a pro se motion for habeas relief under § 2255, alleging that (1) his counsel was ineffective; (2) the evidence was insufficient to support his conviction on the "use or carry" firearms offense; (3) the evidence was insufficient to support his convictions for conspiracy to extort and kidnapping; and (4) the district court committed numerous errors in sentencing. On November 30, 1995, the district court adopted the magistrate judge's recommendation that the petition be denied on the merits. On December 6, 1995, the Supreme Court decided Bailey v. United States, --- U.S. ----, 116 S.Ct. 501, 133 L.Ed.2d 472 (1995), reinterpreting the "use" prong of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c); on December 18, 1995, Rocha entered his notice of appeal; and on April 24, 1996, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA"), Pub.L. No. 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996), went into effect.

III.

As no published decision of this court has addressed the issue, we must first decide whether 28 U.S.C. § 2253, as recently amended by the AEDPA, requires that Rocha receive a certificate of appealability ("COA") before we may hear his appeal. ¹ The statute now provides:

Unless a circuit justice or judge issues a certificate of appealability, an appeal may not be taken to the court of appeals from--

(A) the final order in a habeas corpus proceeding in which the detention complained of arises out of process issued by a State court; or

(B) the final order in a proceeding under section 2255.

28 U.S.C. § 2253(c)(1). Prior to the enactment of the AEDPA, no COA was required; a timely notice of appeal was sufficient to vest jurisdiction in this court. As Rocha's appeal was pending on the AEDPA's effective date, and he has never received a COA, the retroactivity of § 2253(c)(1)(B) is squarely before us. ²

Our retroactivity analysis follows the test of Landgraf v. USI Film Prod., 511 U.S. 244, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994). There, the Court reaffirmed the longstanding presumption against statutory retroactivity but noted that "procedural" rules--the COA requirement being a good example--in some circumstances may be applied retroactively to pending cases. Id. at 275, 114 S.Ct. at 1502.

The threshold inquiry under Landgraf is whether Congress "has expressly prescribed the statute's proper reach," for if it has, that legislative command must be obeyed. Id. at 280, 114 S.Ct. at 1505. If Congress has not spoken to retroactivity, however, we must consider whether the new statute "would impair rights a party possessed when he acted, increase a party's liability for past conduct, or impose new duties with respect to transactions already completed." Id. When the new rule implicates these concerns, the traditional presumption of non-retroactivity applies. Id.

Landgraf, then, requires us (1) to ask whether Congress has spoken expressly to the retroactivity of the COA requirement, and if it has not, (2) to analyze the requirement's effects on the parties as described above. As nothing in the text of the AEDPA expressly speaks to its retroactivity in non-capital cases, we may proceed immediately to the second prong of the test. Fortunately, much of our work in this regard has already been accomplished by previous decisions of this court.

In Drinkard, we held that an application for a certificate of probable cause ("CPC") in a § 2254 appeal could be treated as an application for a COA without violating Landgraf 's dictates, as the difference between a CPC and a COA is one of mere nomenclature. Id. at 756. That is, " '[b]ecause the standard governing the issuance of a [COA] requires the same showing as that for obtaining a [CPC], application of § 102 of the [AEDPA] to Petitioner's request for a [CPC] would not constitute retroactive application of a statute under Landgraf.... ' " Id. (quoting Lennox v. Evans, 87 F.3d 431, 434 (10th Cir.1996), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 746, 136 L.Ed.2d 684 (1997)).

Citing Drinkard, we extended this analysis from applications for certificates to the certificates themselves in Brown v. Cain, 104 F.3d 744, 748-49 (5th Cir.1997). Because Brown's CPC had given him a " 'settled expectation' [ ] that he had successfully passed all procedural hurdles" to consideration of his claims, however, we held that "[a]pplying the AEDPA's COA requirement to Brown in a technical fashion would clearly raise retroactivity concerns." Id. at 749. Thus, we concluded, the COA requirement does not apply retroactively to § 2254 appellants who obtained CPC's before the AEDPA's effective date. Id.

Straightforward application of our reasoning in Drinkard and Brown leads us similarly to conclude that the COA requirement does not apply retroactively to § 2255 appeals that were pending on the AEDPA's effective date. Before the AEDPA took effect, appeals in § 2255 cases were as of right, and neither a COA nor a CPC was required. Application of the COA requirement to Rocha thus would work an even greater retroactive effect than that which we rejected in Brown, where the AEDPA merely would have required the petitioner-appellant to obtain a COA under the same standard as he previously had obtained a CPC. That is, because Landgraf mandates that the COA requirement not be retroactive in § 2254 cases, it follows that it must also not be retroactive in § 2255 cases, where retroactivity would have a more dramatic effect.

Rocha did everything necessary to invoke the jurisdiction of this court at the time he filed his notice of appeal. Nothing in the AEDPA suggests that Congress meant us to dismiss appeals that were properly filed and pending as of the act's effective date, or otherwise to restrict an appellant's right of review after it has been properly invoked.

We therefore conclude that the AEDPA's COA requirement does not retroactively apply to § 2255 appeals in which the final judgment and notice of appeal were entered before the AEDPA's effective date. This conclusion brings us into accord with the other federal circuits that have considered the issue. ³

IV.

We now proceed to the merits. For the first time on appeal, Rocha raises a claim that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to support his 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) "use or carry" conviction in light of the reinterpretation of "use" in Bailey. His failure to raise this highly fact-dependent claim in the district court prevents us from considering it for the first time on appeal. ⁴ Rocha, of course, could hardly be expected to have raised a Bailey claim before Bailey was decided, but his proper course of action is to file a successive § 2255 motion, not to raise the issue for the first time here. ⁵

Rocha also contends that the district court erred in rejecting his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. The district court, adopting the recommendation of the magistrate judge, found that Rocha's only serious argument for ineffective assistance was that his counsel had failed to obtain a separate trial. Noting that the court that heard Rocha's direct appeal correctly rejected his claim that he should have received a severance, the district court held that his counsel's failure to obtain something to which he was not entitled could not constitute ineffective assistance. See Rocha, 916 F.2d at 227-32.

As Rocha has failed to adduce any additional arguments his counsel could have raised in support of the severance motion, he falls far short of meeting the deficiency-plus-prejudice standard of Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2064, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). The ineffective assistance claim was properly denied.

Rocha further argues that his conviction for conspiracy to commit extortion is invalid because it was based on the same overt...