Velazquez v. United States
- Kimba Wood
- 1:20-cv-04981
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Velazquez v. United States, Judge Donnelly transferred an unrepresented prisoner’s petition to the sentencing court because sentence challenges must use a different procedure.
Adalberto Velazquez’s federal sentence challenge was transferred from the Eastern District of New York to the Southern District of New York, where the opinion says he was sentenced.
What happened
In Velazquez v. United States, Adalberto Velazquez, who was incarcerated and representing himself, filed a petition challenging his guilty plea and sentence. He filed it under the law used to challenge how a sentence is carried out.
The court explained that Velazquez was actually challenging the validity of his sentence, not how it was being carried out. It therefore said he had to use the federal procedure for challenging a sentence, and that the proper court was the court where he was sentenced.
Judge Ann M. Donnelly ordered the clerk to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York. After the transfer, the clerk was asked to mark the case closed; the court did not decide whether Velazquez’s guilty plea or sentence was valid.
The detailed version
- Velazquez v. United States · No. 1:20-cv-04981
- Kimba Wood
- June 29, 2020
Background
Adalberto Velazquez, proceeding without a lawyer and incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241. The petition challenged his guilty plea before Judge Kimba M. Wood in the Southern District of New York criminal case identified as United States v. Velazquez, 19-cr-00116-01.
Reasoning
The court distinguished between a challenge to the execution of a sentence—how the sentence is being carried out—and a challenge to the sentence’s validity. It determined that Velazquez was challenging the validity of his sentence. The court therefore held that the challenge had to proceed under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 rather than § 2241. The court further stated that, under § 2255, venue is proper in the district where the petitioner was sentenced.
Disposition
Judge Ann M. Donnelly ordered the clerk to transfer the case to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The court waived the local rule requiring a seven-day delay before the transfer and requested that the clerk mark the case closed after transfer. The opinion did not decide the validity of Velazquez’s guilty plea or sentence.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.