Datta v. United States

Background

Vikram Datta, who remained in home confinement and was acting without a lawyer, filed a document seeking due process regarding his imprisonment and forfeiture orders. Although he requested an evidentiary hearing, the district court understood his claim to be that he had been tried on one indictment but sentenced on a different indictment on which he had not been tried.

Datta had been convicted on conspiracy charges involving money laundering and related interstate and foreign travel. The court granted his motion for a judgment of acquittal on Count One. It sentenced him on January 20, 2012, to concurrent prison terms on Counts Two and Three. The convictions were affirmed on appeal, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case.

Earlier collateral motion

In 2014, Datta filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, a procedure allowing a federal prisoner to challenge a conviction or sentence. He argued, among other things, that the government had entrapped him and that his lawyer had been ineffective. The district court denied that motion on the merits and denied a certificate of appealability in 2015. The court therefore treated the new filing as a second or successive § 2255 motion.

Indictment and judgment errors

The original indictment and the first superseding indictment, called S1, named Datta as the only defendant. Shortly before trial, the government filed a second superseding indictment, called S2, naming another defendant as well. At Datta’s September 7, 2011 arraignment, the court expressly stated that Datta’s trial would proceed under S1. The court found that Datta was in fact tried under S1 and was charged, tried, and sentenced only in case 11-cr-0102.

The original written judgment mistakenly used the S2 designation and included an incorrect case number on later pages. It also initially imposed 235 months on Count Three, exceeding that count’s statutory maximum. A first amended judgment corrected the sentence on Count Three to 60 months, but did not correct all of the case-number errors. A second amended judgment filed in 2016 corrected the remaining identification errors.

The court stated that case 09-cr-949 involved two cooperating witnesses and that Datta was never a party to it. According to the court, references to that case appeared in the judgment documents only because of clerical errors. The court also noted that it had corrected the excessive sentence on Count Three.

Ruling

The district court did not rule on the merits of Datta’s new due-process claim. It concluded that the filing was a second or successive § 2255 motion. Under the procedure described by the court, the district court could not act on that motion unless the Court of Appeals first granted permission. The court therefore ordered the Clerk to transfer the motion to the Court of Appeals under Liriano v. United States.