Question Presented
When a federal appeals court’s own prior rulings foreclose a prisoner’s argument but courts in other circuits have sided with the prisoner on that same legal issue, must the appeals court grant the prisoner permission to appeal?
Facts of the Case
In 2013, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida charged Corey Duran Berry with attempted carjacking, completed carjacking, and related firearm offenses. He pleaded guilty to three counts and received a total sentence of 218 months in prison, including a mandatory consecutive 84 months for brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.
Years later, after the Supreme Court issued decisions that cast doubt on whether his offense could support the firearm conviction, Berry obtained authorization to file a second motion in federal district court challenging that conviction. The district court denied the motion, applying Eleventh Circuit precedent that required Berry to prove it was more likely than not that his conviction rested solely on a legal theory the Supreme Court had since struck down as unconstitutional. Courts in several other circuits apply a less demanding standard to the same type of claim. Berry then sought permission from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to appeal the denial, arguing that the disagreement among circuits showed his claim was genuinely open to debate. Federal law requires prisoners to obtain that permission — called a certificate of appealability — before they can appeal a denied habeas petition. The Eleventh Circuit has its own precedent holding that it will not grant such permission when a claim is barred by the circuit’s binding prior rulings, even if courts in other circuits have ruled differently on the same issue.
The district court denied Berry’s motion and declined to grant him permission to appeal, and a single judge of the Eleventh Circuit also denied permission to appeal; that court’s local rules barred Berry from seeking full-court reconsideration of that denial.