Lewis v. Bradley
- Gregory Woods
- 1:22-cv-07777
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 8
In Lewis v. United States, Judge Woods reclassified Lewis’s sentence challenge and gave him 60 days to explain its likely lateness.
Kevin Lewis, whose § 2241 petition was reclassified as a § 2255 motion and whose sentence challenge was subject to a 60-day deadline to address timeliness; the United States was not required to respond at this stage.
What happened
In Kevin Lewis v. United States of America, Kevin Lewis challenged his 109-month federal sentence through a petition under a law generally used to challenge a prisoner’s detention. He argued that later legal developments undermined the use of his prior attempted-robbery convictions to classify him as a career offender. The court concluded that this type of challenge had to be brought under a different federal procedure for attacking a federal sentence.
The court explained that the procedure Lewis used was unavailable because the sentence-challenge procedure was not inadequate or ineffective. It also said Lewis had not claimed that he was innocent of the prior robbery offenses, and that controlling Second Circuit decisions treated New York attempted robbery as a crime of violence for the relevant guideline purposes. The court determined that the sentence challenge appeared untimely because Lewis filed it nearly four years after the one-year deadline.
Judge Gregory H. Woods reclassified the petition as a sentence challenge under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, but did not deny it at this stage. Lewis has 60 days either to withdraw it or to file a declaration explaining why it should not be denied as time barred; if he does not comply, the motion will be denied as time barred. The court also terminated his request to proceed without paying the filing fee and declined to issue a certificate of appealability.
The detailed version
- Lewis v. Bradley · No. 1:22-cv-07777
- Gregory Woods
- Oct. 27, 2022
Background
Kevin Lewis, proceeding without a lawyer, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 challenging the legality of his 109-month federal sentence. He had pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute and possess cocaine base. At sentencing, the court applied the career-offender guideline based on Lewis’s prior New York convictions for second-degree attempted robbery and third-degree attempted robbery. Lewis did not appeal his conviction or previously file a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, the procedure generally used by a federal prisoner to challenge a federal conviction or sentence.
Lewis first filed the § 2241 petition in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. That court transferred the matter to the Southern District of New York, concluding that § 2255 was the proper vehicle for Lewis’s sentence challenge. Lewis argued that § 2255 was inadequate or ineffective and that he should therefore be allowed to proceed under § 2241. He contended that later legal developments meant his prior attempted-robbery convictions no longer qualified as crimes of violence for purposes of the career-offender guideline.
Why the Court Rejected the § 2241 Route
The court held that the exception allowing limited use of § 2241 did not apply. Section 2255 is not considered inadequate or ineffective merely because a prisoner cannot satisfy its procedural requirements, including its filing deadline, when the claim was previously available. Lewis had not filed an earlier § 2255 motion, so that procedure remained available to him even though the court found his proposed motion untimely.
The court also held that Lewis could not satisfy the actual-innocence requirement relevant to this exception. His argument challenged the classification of his prior offenses for sentencing purposes; it did not assert that he was innocent of those offenses. In addition, the court stated that Second Circuit decisions held that attempted robbery under New York law qualifies as a crime of violence under the relevant guideline provisions.
Recharacterization and Filing Deadline
The court recharacterized Lewis’s § 2241 petition as a motion under § 2255. Under the applicable one-year limitation period, the court determined that Lewis’s conviction became final on October 31, 2017, and that the deadline to file was October 31, 2018. Because the Middle District received his filing on August 1, 2022, the court determined that the motion was untimely.
The court gave Lewis 60 days to choose between two options: notify the court in writing that he wishes to withdraw the motion, or file a declaration showing why the motion should not be denied as time barred. The declaration must allege facts showing diligent pursuit of his rights and an extraordinary circumstance that prevented timely filing. The court stated that, if Lewis files a proper declaration, it will review it and may order the motion served on the United States. If he does not comply and cannot show good cause for that failure, the motion will be denied as time barred.
Other Orders
The court directed the Clerk to change the action’s classification to a motion to vacate a sentence under § 2255. It directed the Clerk to terminate Lewis’s request to proceed without paying the filing fee because no filing fee was required. The court also stated that no certificate of appealability would issue and denied permission to proceed without paying the filing fee for an appeal. The order did not finally deny the § 2255 motion at that time.
Read the full 8-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.