Williams v. United States

Background

John Todd Williams, representing himself, asked the court under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 to vacate or set aside his 2016 conviction and sentence for conspiring to commit wire fraud. A jury had found him guilty after a five-day trial. The court had sentenced him to five years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and had imposed forfeiture and restitution orders of $3,995,443.53 each. The Second Circuit affirmed the conviction and sentence in 2018.

Williams presented nineteen claimed grounds for relief, which the court grouped into eight distinct claims. He argued that the indictment was invalid because it charged conspiracy to commit wire fraud rather than substantive wire fraud; that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act barred the criminal prosecution; that the search warrant, arrest warrant, and indictment were altered or otherwise defective; and that his attorneys provided ineffective assistance. He also claimed ineffective assistance based on his attorney’s alleged conflict of interest, failure to seek bail, and failure to raise various legal arguments.

Court’s analysis

The court ruled that two claims were outside its authority to consider under Section 2255. One challenged the representation of Williams’s company’s lawyer in a separate civil enforcement case, not Williams’s federal criminal sentence. The other challenged pretrial counsel’s failure to seek bail, but the court held that such a claim became moot after Williams was convicted and sentenced.

The court held that four claims had already been presented to and rejected by the Second Circuit on direct appeal. Because Williams did not show an intervening change in law that would require reconsideration, the court treated those claims as barred from being raised again in a Section 2255 proceeding.

The court also held that Williams had procedurally defaulted his claim that the indictment was defective because he had the opportunity to raise it on direct appeal but did not do so in his merits-stage appellate filings. Williams did not show a legally sufficient reason for that failure, actual harm from the alleged error, or factual innocence. The court therefore refused to review that claim directly.

The court did consider the merits of Williams’s claim that appointed attorney Mark DeMarco had an actual conflict of interest after Williams sued him for malpractice. It found no actual conflict sufficient to presume harm. The court also found that Williams had not identified specific deficient acts by DeMarco or shown that the result would probably have been different. The court noted that DeMarco had called Williams as a defense witness and had filed motions, responded to the prosecution, cross-examined government witnesses, and presented a defense.

The court considered six additional ineffective-assistance claims based on counsel’s failure to argue that the indictment should have charged substantive wire fraud. It rejected those claims because the argument was meritless. Section 1349 provides that a conspiracy to commit an offense is subject to the same penalties as the offense that was the conspiracy’s object, and the law treats conspiracy and the completed substantive offense as separate crimes. The court therefore found that counsel was not ineffective for declining to make that argument. Four other ineffective-assistance claims were barred by the appellate mandate rule because they attempted to repackage arguments already rejected on direct appeal.

Disposition

The court denied Williams’s Section 2255 motion. It did not issue a certificate of appealability because Williams had not made the required substantial showing that a constitutional right had been denied. It also certified that any appeal would not be taken in good faith and ruled that Williams could not proceed without paying the filing fee. Judge Sullivan signed the order while sitting by designation as a district judge.