Roland Castro v. United States
HabeasCorpus Immigration Privacy JusticiabilityDoctri
Whether petitioner's 240-month sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) must be vacated because it is unclear whether he was sentenced under the unconstitutionally vague residual clause
QUESTION PRESENTED Petitioner Roland Castro, in his appeal of the district court’s denial of his second or successive motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, argued that his 240-month sentence of imprisonment, imposed under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), must be vacated because it is unclear whether the district court sentenced him under the constitutionally infirm residual clause, see Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551, 2557-58 (2015), and he has already served more than the 10-year statutory maximum that applies to him in light of United States v. Herrold, 883 F.3d 517 (Sth Cir. 2018) (en banc), petition for cert. filed, No. 17-1445 (April 18, 2018), which made clear that there is no alternative basis for holding that his prior Texas burglary convictions qualify as ACCA predicates. The Fifth Circuit, in an unpublished opinion, recognized that the district court did not state which part of the “violent felony” definition it was applying when it treated Mr. Castro as an armed career criminal. United States v. Castro, -Fed. Appx. --, 2018 WL 6070373, at *1 (Sth Cir. Nov. 20, 2018) (