DeAngelo Sanders v. M. Joseph

In the
United States Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 19-2504
DEANGELO SANDERS,
Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
M. JOSEPH, Warden,
Respondent-Appellee.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Illinois.
No. 16-cv-1249-SMY — Staci M. Yandle, Judge.
____________________
ARGUED APRIL 14, 2022 — DECIDED JULY 7, 2023
____________________
Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and HAMILTON and SCUDDER,
Circuit Judges.
SYKES, Chief Judge. DeAngelo Sanders was convicted in
2006 of two firearms offenses in the Southern District of
Illinois. At his sentencing hearing in 2007, the district court
imposed an enhanced sentence under the Armed Career
Criminal Act (“ACCA”), 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), based on three of
Sanders’s prior convictions, including one for Illinois resi-
2 No. 19-2504
dential burglary. His direct appeal failed, as did his motion
for collateral relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255.
In the intervening years, Sanders has applied three times
for our permission to file a successive § 2255 motion. See
28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(3). Under § 2255(h) a successive motion is
permitted if and only if it contains “newly discovered evi-
dence” of innocence or is based on a “new rule of constitu-
tional law, made retroactive to cases on collateral review by
the Supreme Court.” Sanders’s successive motions did not
satisfy either of these conditions, so we denied all three
applications.
Sanders then filed a petition for habeas corpus under
28 U.S.C. § 2241 seeking another round of collateral review
via the “saving clause” in 28 U.S.C. § 2255(e). 1 Ordinarily a
§ 2255 motion in the sentencing court is the exclusive meth-
od for a federal prisoner to collaterally attack his conviction
or sentence, but § 2255(e) preserves a path to collateral
review via habeas. On its face the saving-clause gateway to
habeas review is narrow: the statute provides that a federal
prisoner’s § 2241 motion “shall not be entertained” unless
the remedy by motion under § 2255 “is inadequate or inef-
fective to test the legality of his detention.” § 2255(e).
1 A habeas petition must be filed in the district where the prisoner is
confined. 28 U.S.C. §§ 2242, 2243; Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U.S. 426, 434–35
(2004). When Sanders filed his § 2241 petition, he was confined in a
federal prison in the Southern District of Illinois, the same district in
which he was convicted and sentenced. He properly filed his § 2241
petition there. He has since been transferred to a federal prison in
Georgia. The change in his custodian does not affect our jurisdiction. See
In re Hall, 988 F.3d 376, 377–78 (7th Cir. 2021).
No. 19-2504 3
Our decision in In re Davenport opened the saving-clause
gateway for certain habeas claims premised on new
statutory-interpretation decisions. 147 F.3d 605 (7th Cir.
1998). Channeling postconviction review to the § 2255
remedy and restricting prisoners to one such motion—with
limited exceptions for newly discovered evidence and new
rules of constitutional law—blocks prisoners from seeking
the benefit of later statutory-interpretation decisions. We
held in Davenport that § 2255 is “inadequate or ineffective”—
and § 2241 is therefore available—when the limits on succes-
sive § 2255 motions bar relief and the prisoner’s claim is
based on a new interpretation of a criminal statute that was
previously foreclosed by circuit precedent. Id. at 610–11.
Sanders’s habeas petition proposed to raise a Davenport
claim challenging his ACCA-enhanced sentence based on
Mathis v. United States, 579 U.S. 500 (2016). The district judge
denied relief. After Sanders appealed that decision, we held
that a conviction for Illinois residential burglary cannot be
used to enhance a sentence under the ACCA. United States v.
Glispie, 978 F.3d 502, 503 (7th Cir. 2020) (per curiam). Be-
cause one of Sanders’s ACCA predicates was an Illinois
residential-burglary conviction, he pointed to Glispie and
argued that he was entitled to § 2241 relief on that basis as
well.
On the first go-around we disagreed and summarily af-
firmed the district court’s decision in an unpublished order.
Sanders sought panel rehearing, arguing that he was previ-
ously precluded from making a Glispie-like argument by our
decision in United States v. King, 62 F.3d 891 (7th Cir. 1995).
We agreed that his case deserved another look. We reasoned
that if Sanders could rely on Glispie to pass through the
4 No. 19-2504
saving clause and if he had been previously precluded by
circuit precedent from making a Glispie-like argument, then
he might be entitled to seek § 2241 relief under Davenport.
That, in turn, raised the question whether Glispie, as a
circuit-level statutory-interpretation case (rather than one
from the Supreme Court), could satisfy the requirements of
our Davenport saving-clause test. We therefore granted panel
rehearing, vacated our earlier order, and recruited pro bono
counsel to represent Sanders in presenting these complex
issues. 2
After rebriefing and oral argument, the Supreme Court
granted certiorari in Jones v. Hendrix, 142 S. Ct. 2706 (mem.)
(2022), which raised the question whether Davenport’s
interpretation of the saving clause—and similar interpreta-
tions adopted in other circuits—is correct. Because Sanders’s
habeas petition depends on the continued viability of our
decision in Davenport, we held this appeal for the Court’s
ruling in Jones v. Hendrix.
That decision is now in. The Supreme Court has rejected
Davenport’s interpretation of the saving clause. Jones v.
Hendrix, 21-857, 2023 WL 4110233, at *7 (June 22, 2023). As
the Court explained:
Section 2255(h) specifies the two limited condi-
tions in which Congress has permitted federal
prisoners to bring second or successive collat-
2 Attorney Robert J. Palmer of May Oberfell Lorber accepted the repre-
sentation and has ably discharged his duties. He supervised law stu-
dents Madeline Callaghan and Shannon Mukerji of the University of
Notre Dame Law School, who assisted him on this appeal. We thank
Mr. Palmer and his students for their service to their client and the court.
No. 19-2504 5
eral attacks on their sentences. The inability of
a prisoner with a statutory claim to satisfy
those conditions does not mean that he can
bring his claim in a habeas petition under the
saving clause. It means that he cannot bring it
at all. Congress has chosen finality over error
correction in his case.
Id. at *9. The Court’s ruling abrogates Davenport.
Under Jones v. Hendrix, Sanders cannot bring his statuto-
ry claim in a § 2241 habeas petition via the saving clause;
indeed, “he cannot bring it at all.” Id. We therefore affirm the
district court’s judgment denying his § 2241 petition, though
on different grounds.
AFFIRMED