Effect of defendant’s unconditional plea; United States v Abdulmutallab; Applicability of FedRCrimP 11(a)(2); United States v Johnson (Unpub 6th Cir); Sixth Amendment ineffective assistance of counsel claim on direct appeal; Application of the § 2K2.1(b)(6)(B) sentence enhancement; United States v Shanklin; Reliance on hearsay statements; United States v Armstrong

The court concluded that defendant-Williams’s Second and Fourth Amendment arguments were beyond its reach due to his unconditional guilty plea. It declined to decide his Sixth Amendment ineffective assistance of counsel claim on direct appeal, per its usual practice. That left his challenge to his sentencing enhancement for possessing a firearm in connection with a felony offense, and the court held that it was supported by ample evidence. Thus, it affirmed his FIP convictions and his 100-month sentence. He pled guilty without a plea agreement. Under Abdulmutallab, the “usual rule is that when a defendant unconditionally pleads guilty, he” may not generally later “‘raise independent claims relating to the deprivation of constitutional rights that occurred’” before entry of the plea. Rule 11(a)(2) “carves out a narrow exception.” It requires a “defendant to reserve the right to appeal specific pre-plea issues ‘in writing’ and to obtain the government’s and the district court’s consent to those reservations.” The court found that a “straightforward reading of Williams’s plea hearing transcript” showed that Abdulmutallab controlled “here. For one, there was no written plea agreement, which Rule 11(a)(2) requires. For another, neither Williams, the district court, nor the government ‘specified’ any ‘pretrial motion[s]’ for which [he] was reserving his right to appeal.” He relied on “the district court’s statement at his plea hearing that ‘there’s no plea agreement here, so you’re not waiving any of your appellate rights, other than just the fact that you end up testifying that you did what the Government said you did.’” But the court recently held in Johnson “that a district court’s use of similar language—namely, that the defendant had ‘not waived any appeal rights’—was insufficient to demonstrate that a plea was conditional.” As to a separate statement the district court made at his sentencing hearing, in this “Circuit, a district court cannot revive a defendant’s appellate rights at sentencing by erroneously stating that the defendant has preserved certain issues for appeal.” As to application of § 2K2.1(b)(6)(B), when a district court at sentencing relies on hearsay statements “there must be some ‘minimal indicium of reliability.’” In this case, where a witness gave dueling statements, a host of reasons supported the district court’s assessment that the original one “carried greater indicia of reliability.”