In United States v. Pearson, No. 17-14619 (Oct. 15,
2019) (Tjoflat, Newsom, Antoon), the Court upheld a new sentence imposed
after the the court vacated the defendant's ACCA enhancement in a successive
2255 motion based on Johnson.
At the re-sentencing hearing, the defendant collaterally
challenged several of his 924(c) counts, alleging that the indictment did not allege every element of the
offense. The Eleventh Circuit concluded
that this challenge was procedurally improper because the defendant had not
received authorization to raise that claim in a second or successive 2255
motion. Therefore, the district court
lacked jurisdiction to consider it. The
Court also upheld as substantively reasonable the new lower 447-month sentence,
which was the result of a low-end guideline range sentence for some counts,
followed by 384 months based on 924(c) counts.
