United States v. Mitchell

The district court granted Stephen Mitchell habeas relief and gave him a sentence of time-served with three years of supervised release. Both Mitchell and the United States appealed. Since those appeals were filed, the Sixth Circuit decided substantially-similar cases. At the time of his sentencing, Mitchell’s three prior convictions qualified as “violent” felonies under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), meaning Mitchell was subject to the ACCA’s enhanced sentencing. Applying the ACCA, the trial judge sentenced Mitchell to 250 months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release. But after the Supreme Court invalidated the ACCA’s so-called residual clause as unconstitutionally vague, and then applied that holding retroactively, Mitchell filed for habeas relief. Mitchell argued that without the ACCA’s residual clause, his prior felonies no longer qualified as “violent” under the ACCA. Therefore, he said his 250-month, ACCA-enhanced sentence was invalid. Without the ACCA, the maximum sentence Mitchell could have served for his felon-in-possession conviction was ten years. But Mitchell had already served seventeen years by the end of his habeas proceeding. So the district court decided to release Mitchell from custody and correct his sentence to “time- served.” The district court also re-imposed Mitchell’s original three years of supervised release. The Sixth Circuit affirmed the district court's habeas relief insofar as it held that Mitchell’s burglary conviction was not a “violent” felony under the ACCA. The district court’s judgment as it related to Mitchell’s sentence was vacated and remanded for a determination of whether: (1) a time-served sentence that is equivalent to a term-of-months sentence above the statutory maximum is invalid; and (2) a district court has the discretion to select appropriate proceedings for correcting a sentence—so long as the corrected sentence complies with substantive and procedural reasonableness. View "United States v. Mitchell" on Justia Law