Miles v. Birkholz
- Eric Tostrud
- 0:19-cv-00884
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 4
Judge Tostrud accepted the recommendation in Miles v. Birkholz, denied and dismissed the detention petition without prejudice, and denied Miles’s other motions.
Kelvin J. Miles, whose petitions were denied and dismissed without prejudice and whose other listed motions were denied; B. Birkholz, the respondent, prevailed on the motions addressed in the order.
What happened
In Miles v. Birkholz, Kelvin J. Miles challenged his detention and parole-related matters through a federal petition. A magistrate judge recommended denying and dismissing the petition and denying Miles’s other pending motions.
The court independently reviewed the recommendation. It found that Miles’s objections either were too vague, unsupported by the record, repeated arguments already rejected, or raised new challenges to his convictions. The court also noted that conviction challenges generally must be brought through a motion in the sentencing court, unless that remedy is inadequate or ineffective.
Judge Eric C. Tostrud overruled Miles’s objections and accepted the recommendation. The court denied and dismissed both petitions without prejudice, and denied each of Miles’s other listed motions.
The detailed version
- Miles v. Birkholz · No. 0:19-cv-00884
- Eric Tostrud
- Mar. 12, 2020
Background
Kelvin J. Miles filed a petition and an amended petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, a federal statute allowing a person to challenge certain aspects of detention. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Cowan Wright issued a Report and Recommendation on January 24, 2020, recommending that the petitions be denied and dismissed and that Miles’s other pending motions be denied. Miles objected.
Court’s analysis
The district court reviewed the Report and Recommendation independently, as required by 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1) and the local rules. The court concluded that Miles’s objection stating he was “denied process of laws” was a legal conclusion that did not specifically challenge the recommendation’s analysis of his due-process argument.
The court also found that Miles’s objection concerning pages 7 through 9 of the recommendation did not meaningfully address those pages, which discussed the Revitalization Act and the rules governing the United States Parole Commission’s authority to conduct parole hearings for District of Columbia Code offenders. To the extent Miles argued that he should have received parole while serving his Maryland sentence and therefore should have begun his District of Columbia sentence earlier, the court found that argument unsupported by the record and repetitive of an argument already rejected.
Miles also objected to issues surrounding his convictions. The court said those arguments were raised for the first time in the objection and therefore were waived. In addition, the court noted that Miles had not tried to show that a motion under D.C. Code § 23-110 would have been inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention. The court explained that a challenge to a federal conviction or sentence generally must be brought through a motion to vacate in the sentencing court under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, rather than through a detention petition under § 2241 filed in the court where the person is incarcerated.
Disposition
The court overruled Miles’s objections and accepted the Report and Recommendation. It denied and dismissed, without prejudice, Miles’s original petition and amended § 2241 petition. It separately denied his motion for summary judgment to vacate or set aside parole, his filing concerning the respondents’ request to dismiss the pro se petition and his request for appointed counsel, his motion for relief, and his filing responding to the respondents’ motion to dismiss the motion for relief. The order directed that judgment be entered accordingly.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.