Jackson: Granting SOS for 1975 Florida aggravated assault and pre-2000 Florida robbery

In In re: Steven Jackson, No. 16-13536-J (June 24, 2016), the Court granted an application for leave to file a second or successive § 2255 motion, post-Johnson. At Jackson’s sentencing, the district court did not announce which ACCA definition it was relying on in sentencing Jackson under ACCA. The Court recognized that Turner v. Warden, 709 F.3d 1328 (11th Cir. 2013) “held that a conviction for aggravated assault under Florida Statute § 784.021 met ACCA’s elements clause definition”, but Turner did not apply because Jackson’s 1971 aggravated assault conviction predated the enactment of the 1975 statute at issue in Turner. The issue whether this 1971 conviction qualified for ACCA purposes was for the district court to decide. The Court also left for the district court to decide whether Jackson’s pre-2000 Florida robbery conviction qualified under ACCA. The Court noted that it had not reached this pre-2000 version of the statute in Lockley, and that, without the residual clause, no binding precedent makes undeniably clear that pre-2000 robbery qualifies under ACCA. The Court recognized that Jackson’s § 2255 motion, once filed in the district court, could be filed more than one year after Johnson, that is, beyond the one-year statute of limitations. The Court noted several possible equitable factors that could allow Jackson’s § 2255 motion to go forward, even if untimely, and left it for the district court to decide this issue in the first instance.