Hueston v. Pliler

Background

Harry Hueston asked for a status update on a motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e) to alter or amend the court’s November 15, 2022 order denying his petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241. The motion was pending at docket number 4 in Hueston v. Pliler.

The November 15 order concerned Hueston’s request for relief from his sentence, which principally included a 180-month prison term. Hueston relied on United States v. Chappelle, which held that Hobbs Act robbery is not a “crime of violence” under the career-offender provision of the Sentencing Guidelines. Hueston sought resentencing without using that career-offender guideline.

Earlier ruling on Hueston’s request

The court’s November 15, 2022 decision denied Hueston’s § 2241 application on four independent grounds: his plea agreement waived a challenge to his sentence if the sentence was at or below the top of the agreed guideline range; the application was procedurally barred; the court would have imposed the same sentence even without the challenged guideline calculation; and settled law did not provide a basis to disregard the appeal waiver because Hueston could not have anticipated a later change in the law.

On February 15, 2023, in Hueston’s criminal case, the court construed Hueston’s later filing mainly as a motion for reconsideration of the November 15 decision and denied it. The court stated that the filing repeated an argument from the § 2241 application. The court also rejected Hueston’s statement that his conviction was no longer valid, explaining that Chappelle concerned a Sentencing Guidelines provision and did not invalidate the statute or Hueston’s guilty-plea conviction for conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery.

Ruling

The May 18, 2023 order attached the February decision and respectfully requested that the clerk close the motion pending at docket number 4 in Hueston v. Pliler. The order did not grant reconsideration or alter the November 15 denial of Hueston’s § 2241 application. The court’s action was limited to resolving the status of the pending motion by directing its closure.

Disposition and classification

The order is classified as a procedural order because it addressed the status and closure of a reconsideration motion rather than deciding the underlying sentencing issue. The related February order denied reconsideration. The opinion does not state that the May 18 order itself separately denied the docket-number-4 motion.

Other rulings described in the attached order

In the February 15 order, the court also declined to issue a certificate of appealability, certified that an appeal would not be taken in good faith, and denied permission to proceed without paying filing fees for purposes of an appeal. Those rulings were made in Hueston’s criminal case, not as separate rulings in the May 18 Hueston v. Pliler order.