Rodgers v. United States
- Kimba Wood
- 1:18-cv-11244
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 9
In Rodgers v. United States, Judge Wood denied Rodgers’s request to vacate his conviction, finding his lawyer was not ineffective.
Arnold Eugene Rodgers, whose petition to vacate his firearm conviction was denied, and the United States.
What happened
Arnold Eugene Rodgers, representing himself, asked the court to vacate his firearm conviction through a rare post-conviction remedy after completing his prison term and supervised release. He argued that his lawyer failed to challenge whether his conduct satisfied the firearm statute’s interstate-commerce requirement.
Rodgers relied on a District of Arizona decision involving a firearm received and used within Arizona. The court explained that decision was not binding in New York, involved different facts, and did not necessarily exclude Rodgers’s conduct, which involved receiving a gun in New Jersey for use in New York and transporting it. The government also argued that the petition was untimely.
Judge Kimba M. Wood denied the petition. She found that counsel’s performance was objectively reasonable and therefore did not separately decide whether Rodgers had shown prejudice or a valid reason for waiting to seek relief.
The detailed version
- Rodgers v. United States · No. 1:18-cv-11244
- Kimba Wood
- June 11, 2020
Background
Arnold Eugene Rodgers petitioned for a writ of error coram nobis under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651. Coram nobis is a limited post-conviction remedy for a person who is no longer in custody and cannot obtain relief through ordinary direct review or other collateral procedures. Rodgers filed the petition pro se, meaning without a lawyer, and sought to vacate his conviction based on alleged ineffective assistance of counsel.
Before his arrest, Rodgers was a supervising longshoreman at the Port of New York-New Jersey. The Drug Enforcement Administration investigated his possible involvement in heroin trafficking. On July 31, 2010, Rodgers agreed to provide a cooperating witness with a firearm. Rodgers drove himself and the witness to a house in New Jersey, obtained a Smith and Wesson 9 millimeter handgun and bullets, and gave them to the witness.
Rodgers was initially indicted on four narcotics-related counts. He later pleaded guilty to a superseding information charging one count under 18 U.S.C. § 924(b). The charge alleged that he transported and received a firearm in interstate commerce while knowing, or having reasonable cause to believe, that it would be used in an offense punishable by more than one year in prison. His plea agreement waived direct appeal and collateral challenges if his sentence fell within or below the stipulated Guidelines range of 18 to 24 months.
The court sentenced Rodgers to 18 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release. It later denied his request for resentencing based on his claimed minor role, explaining that a four-level reduction already granted at sentencing made a further variance unnecessary. Rodgers completed imprisonment on July 11, 2014, and supervised release on July 10, 2016. He filed the coram nobis petition on November 30, 2018.
Legal standard
The court stated that coram nobis relief is a remedy of last resort available only in extraordinary circumstances. A petitioner must show circumstances compelling relief to achieve justice, sound reasons for not seeking earlier relief, and continuing legal consequences from the conviction that the writ could remedy.
For an ineffective-assistance claim, the petitioner must satisfy the two-part test from Strickland v. Washington: counsel’s performance must have been objectively unreasonable, and the deficient performance must have prejudiced the defense. Prejudice requires a reasonable probability that the proceeding would have had a different result without counsel’s errors. The court may reject the claim after finding that either requirement is missing.
Rodgers’s claim
Rodgers argued that counsel failed to investigate the interstate-commerce element of § 924(b), advise him about that element, and challenge what Rodgers characterized as the government’s erroneous description of it. He relied on United States v. Havelock, a 2008 District of Arizona decision holding that § 924(b) did not apply to receiving a firearm that was entirely intrastate in nature.
The court explained that Havelock was not binding in the Second Circuit and that the Second Circuit had not defined the precise scope of § 924(b)’s interstate-commerce requirement. The court also noted that Havelock had been cited by no other court when Rodgers pleaded guilty and had been cited only once afterward. Because the argument based on Havelock was novel and came from a nonbinding decision, counsel was not ineffective for failing to raise it.
The court further found that Havelock did not necessarily control because its facts differed from Rodgers’s. In Havelock, the firearm was received and used within Arizona. Rodgers, by contrast, received the firearm in New Jersey for use in New York. The court viewed those facts as having some contemporaneous connection to interstate commerce rather than being entirely intrastate. It also noted that Rodgers’s case involved both receiving and transporting the firearm, while Havelock addressed only receipt.
Ruling
The court held that defense counsel acted within the wide range of professionally competent assistance. Because Rodgers did not show deficient performance, the court did not separately address prejudice. The court also did not decide whether Rodgers had sound reasons for waiting to seek earlier relief, because it found no colorable ineffective-assistance claim and therefore no basis for coram nobis relief.
The petition for a writ of error coram nobis was DENIED.
Read the full 9-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.