Opinion
Case No. 1:04CR00008
03-21-2016
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ROBERT LEE WILLIAMS, Defendant.
Robert Lee Williams, Pro Se Defendant.
OPINION
Robert Lee Williams, Pro Se Defendant.
On May 25, 2004, I sentenced defendant Robert Lee Williams to 262 months' imprisonment. (Judgment, ECF No. 20.) On October 18, 2005, I dismissed Williams' Motion to Vacate, Set Aside, or Correct Sentence pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2255, and Williams did not appeal. Williams v. United States, No. 7:05CV00335, 2005 WL 2659095, at *3 (W.D. Va. Oct. 18, 2005).
More than ten years later, Williams has filed a pro se motion captioned, "Motion to Correct a Mistake Arising from Oversight or Omission in a Judgment, Order, or Other Part of the Record Pursuant to Rule 60(a) to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure." Williams argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), invalidates his sentence imposed under the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e).
Williams may not attack the judgment or sentence via Rule 60(a). The type of change Williams seeks is not correctable via Rule 60(a) as a result of a clerical mistake or a mistake arising from an oversight or omission. Instead, a Rule 60 motion that seeks to add a new ground for collateral relief is in fact a second or successive collateral attack, regardless of how the motion is captioned. Calderon v. Thompson, 523 U.S. 538, 554 (1998).
Williams argues that in light of Castro v. United States, 540 U.S. 375, 377 (2003), the court should not construe his Rule 60 motion as arising under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. However, Castro does not control because Williams already had filed a § 2255 motion that was dismissed with prejudice. Furthermore, the instant motion is not a "mixed" Rule 60 motion warranting any additional warning from the court, and regardless, Williams already noted his preference to not treat the motion as a successive § 2255 motion. See United States v. McRae, 793 F.3d 392, 399-400 (4th Cir. 2015); see also Gonzalez v. Crosby, 545 U.S. 524, 531-33 (2005) (explaining how to differentiate a true Rule 60 motion from an unauthorized successive habeas motion). --------
Williams' Rule 60(a) motion falls squarely within the class of motions that must be construed as a new § 2255 motion. Because Williams fails to establish that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has authorized him to file a successive § 2255 motion, the construed § 2255 motion must be dismissed without prejudice as successive pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2255(h).
DATED: March 21, 2016
/s/ James P. Jones
United States District Judge