United States v. Williams

• Decision Date: 10 January 2020
• Docket Number: No. 19-1358,19-1358
• Citation: 946 F.3d 968
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Charles WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

946 F.3d 968

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Charles WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 19-1358

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

ARGUED DECEMBER 12, 2019

DECIDED JANUARY 10, 2020

Debra Riggs Bonamici, Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Peter W. Henderson, Attorney, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Urbana, IL, Thomas W. Patton, Attorney, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Peoria, IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before Bauer, Easterbrook, and St. Eve, Circuit Judges.

St. Eve, Circuit Judge.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Rehaif v. United States , ––– U.S. ––––, 139 S. Ct. 2191, 204 L.Ed.2d 594 (2019), upset what was once a seemingly settled question of federal law. The Courts of Appeals had unanimously concluded that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), which prohibits several classes of people from possessing a firearm or ammunition, required the government to prove a defendant knowingly possessed a firearm or ammunition, but not that he knew he belonged to one of the prohibited classes. See, e.g. , United States v. Lane , 267 F.3d 715, 720 (7th Cir. 2001). The Supreme Court in Rehaif corrected this misinterpretation and held that under 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g), 924(a)(2), the government must show "that the defendant knew he possessed a firearm and also that he knew he had the relevant status when he possessed it." 139 S. Ct. at 2194. Charles Williams had already pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm after a felony conviction when the Court issued Rehaif , and his plea reflected the law as it was in this Circuit before that decision. He seeks now, for the first time on direct appeal, to withdraw his plea. We conclude that he bears the burden of showing that his erroneous understanding of the elements of § 922(g) affected his substantial rights—his decision to plead guilty—before he may do so. He has failed to carry that burden, so we affirm the judgment.

I.

In 1998, an Illinois state court convicted Williams, then a teenager, of first-degree murder and sentenced him to thirty years’ imprisonment. Williams was paroled in 2008, but had his parole revoked for the last few months of 2011 based on a domestic battery charge. He pleaded guilty to this offense and served 180 days in jail. Because of his murder conviction, the court could have sentenced him to up to three years’ imprisonment. See 720 ILCS 5/12-3.2(b) ; 730 ILCS 5/5-4.5-45.

Williams had no other criminal history until 2017, when he traded cocaine to his employer for a firearm. His employer cooperated with the government and conducted a controlled buy to purchase the gun back from Williams. For this transaction, a grand jury indicted Williams on one count of possession of a firearm as a felon, 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g)(1), 924(a)(2).

Williams pleaded guilty without a plea agreement, and the district court conducted a thorough colloquy to determine whether this plea was knowing and voluntary. The court confirmed Williams’s admission that he possessed a firearm; that prior to his possessing that firearm, it had traveled in interstate commerce; and that he had been convicted of a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year. Nothing at the plea colloquy revealed definitively whether Williams had known, at the time he possessed the gun, that he had been so convicted. The district court later sentenced him to 96 months’ imprisonment, a year below the bottom of his Guidelines range.

Four months later, the Supreme Court decided Rehaif and held that an element of a conviction under 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g), 924(a)(2), is the defendant’s knowledge of his status (at least for felons and aliens illegally in the United States). 139 S. Ct. at 2200. For Williams, that means the government would have needed to prove—or he to admit—that he knew he had "been convicted in any court of[ ] a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year." 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1).

II.

Williams asks this court to vacate his conviction and allow him to withdraw his guilty plea. Given the timing of Rehaif , Williams never moved to withdraw his plea in the district court, so we review his request to do so now only for plain error. Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(b) ; United States v. Vonn , 535 U.S. 55, 59, 122 S.Ct. 1043, 152 L.Ed.2d 90 (2002) ; United States v. Zacahua , 940 F.3d 342, 344 (7th Cir. 2019). Plain error has four elements: (1) there was an error, (2) the error is clear and obvious, (3) the error affected the defendant’s substantial rights, and (4) the error seriously affects the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings. Zacahua , 940 F.3d at 344. The parties agree that, under Rehaif , the district court’s failure to inquire into Williams’s knowledge of his status or to confirm a factual basis for that element of the offense was an obvious error. See Henderson v. United States , 568 U.S. 266, 269, 133 S.Ct. 1121, 185 L.Ed.2d 85 (2013) (holding that plain error is determined based on law at time of review). They dispute whether the error affected Williams’s substantial rights and the integrity of judicial proceedings.

The defendant ordinarily bears the burden of persuasion on the question whether an error affected substantial rights. Molina-Martinez v. United States , ––– U.S. ––––, 136 S. Ct. 1338, 1348, 194 L.Ed.2d 444 (2016) ; United States v. Olano , 507 U.S. 725, 734, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993). This is true even for errors going to the validity of a guilty plea. United States v. Dominguez Benitez , 542 U.S. 74, 82, 124 S.Ct. 2333, 159 L.Ed.2d 157 (2004) ; Vonn , 535 U.S. at 59, 122 S.Ct. 1043. To meet this burden, "a defendant who seeks reversal of his conviction after a guilty plea, on the ground that the district court committed plain error under Rule 11, must show a reasonable probability that, but for the error, he would not have entered the plea." Dominguez , 542 U.S. at 83, 124 S.Ct. 2333.

Williams argues that he should not be subject to the standard in Dominguez . He proposes that we adopt a new test that he calls "the supervening-decision doctrine," under which the government would bear the burden of proving that an error did not affect the defendant’s rights (i.e., that it was harmless) if a supervening decision reverses settled precedent and alters the elements of an offense to which he pleaded guilty.

Williams identifies United States v. Washington , 12 F.3d 1128 (D.C. Cir. 1994), as the basis for this rule. The D.C. Circuit there applied something called the "supervening-decision doctrine," but it bears little resemblance to Williams’s proposal. In Washington , the D.C. Circuit found the district court’s error affected Washington’s substantial rights but nevertheless affirmed because the error "was not ‘plain’ or ‘obvious’ under current law at the time of trial." Id. at 1138. The supervening-decision doctrine provided an escape hatch for this latter conclusion: the court would correct errors that were plain only at the time of appeal, but only if an objection would have been frivolous (and Washington’s would not have been). Id. at 1138–39. The Supreme Court has since obsoleted this escape hatch—courts now must always analyze whether an error is plain based on the law at the time of review. Henderson , 568 U.S. at 269, 133 S.Ct. 1121. The supervening-decision doctrine, thus, serves no purpose here. Cf. United States v. David , 83 F.3d 638, 646 & n.11 (4th Cir. 1996) (adopting plain-at-time-of-review rule for the same reasons the D.C. Circuit created its doctrine).

The Second Circuit, however, has adopted Williams’s proposal, although under the name of the "modified plain error rule" instead. Under that doctrine, the overturning of settled precedent shifts the burden to the government to prove that any error was not prejudicial. See United States v. Viola , 35 F.3d 37, 42 (2d Cir. 1994). The Second Circuit has reserved the question whether this modified rule is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States , 520 U.S. 461, 117 S.Ct. 1544, 137 L.Ed.2d 718 (1997). See, e.g. , United States v. Botti , 711 F.3d 299, 309 (2d Cir. 2013). It did so most recently in United States v. Balde , 943 F.3d 73, 96 n.6 (2d Cir. 2019), another case involving a Rehaif error.

The Second Circuit did not need to decide who carried the burden of persuasion because Souleymane Balde had shown an effect on substantial rights even if he had the burden. Balde had entered a guilty plea conditioned on his right to appeal the district court’s determination that he was "an alien ... illegally or unlawfully in the United States" under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5)(A). 943 F.3d at 79. Balde’s immigration status was complicated. The government had granted him advanced parole to leave the country while his request for adjustment of status was pending, but it revoked that parole and denied adjustment while he was overseas. Shortly after he returned, the government ordered him removed, but it could not effect his deportation after his foreign passport expired. Id. at 78–79. Because Balde’s status was "hotly contested" (he had argued, unsuccessfully, that he was either legally present or not "in" the United States) there was a "significant possibility" that he might not be guilty at all. Id. at 97. This possibility more than carried his burden of demonstrating an effect on his substantial rights and the integrity of judicial proceedings. Id. at 98.

We cannot so easily avoid the issue of burden placement, because the record here is nearly silent on Williams’s knowledge of his uncontested felon status. Williams argues that this silence should favor him because the Dominguez Court emphasized that "the violation claimed was of Rule 11, not of due process." 542 U.S. at 83, 124 S.Ct. 2333. He contends (and the government does not dispute) that a misunderstanding of the elements of an offense, shared by the defendant, the lawyers, and the judge, is evidence of an unknowing and...