Pleas & Sentencing – Collateral Relief

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Criminal

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and SYKES and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Pleas & Sentencing – Collateral Relief

15-2427 Benjamin Price v. United States of America

Where holding of Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015) applies retroactively to cases involving collateral review.

“When the new rule is substantive, it is easy (as Justice O’Connor pointed out in Tyler) to demonstrate the required declaration from the Supreme Court confirming that the rule is retroactive: “When the Court holds as a new rule in a sub- sequent case that a particular species of primary, private individual conduct is beyond the power of the criminal law- making authority to proscribe, it necessarily follows that this Court has ‘made’ that new rule retroactive.” Tyler, 533 U.S. at 669; see also Summerlin, 542 U.S. at 351–52 (“New substantive rules generally apply retroactively … because they ‘necessarily carry a significant risk that a defendant stands convicted of an act that the law does not make criminal’ or faces a punishment that the law cannot impose upon him.”) (quoting Bousley v. United States, 523 U.S. 614, 620 (1998)). This is entirely consistent with Teague, which also recognized that new substantive rules are categorically retroactive. (The matter is not so “straightforward with respect to the second Teague exception … for ‘watershed rules of criminal procedure,’” Tyler, 533 U.S. at 669–70 (O’Connor, J., concurring) (quoting Teague, 489 U.S. at 311), but the case before us does not present any such proposed rule.)”

Affirmed.

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.