Federal 2255 Motion Attorney Explains How We Handle Post-Conviction Cases

I want to spend a little bit of time talking about 2255 petitions, kind of what they are and how our firm handles them and how you can use them to try to get relief in your case. So generally, when somebody's been convicted in federal court, unless they have filed an appellate waiver, you know, they had the opportunity to do like a direct appeal of the case. But what we see is that a lot of people, you know, kind of made to file these appellate waivers. And so what that does is it waives the right to do a direct appeal. And so people want to know, well, what can we do? I mean, how can we challenge our conviction? So you want to think about a 2255 petition. And a 2255 petition is something that you file in the same court where you were convicted. Okay, so it goes before that same judge, but you can raise allegations of ineffective assistance of counsel You can raise allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. In some cases, if there's been like an intervening case from the United States Supreme Court, you can try to get relief based on that new case by filing the 2255 petition. Now, in order to handle one of these cases, right, as a lawyer, I mean, you really need to have a good faith basis to do that. All right. I mean, and what I mean by that is that there's got to be like some basis in either law or fact that supports, you know, a potentially meritorious claim in 2255. You know, it's not a situation where you can just file anything. Okay. And so what we do here is we have to conduct a case review of the case before we can agree to handle these cases. And what that generally means is that we will need to get a copy of the PSR. We'll need to get any kind of relevant transcripts like either the plea or the sentencing or the trial. And then we set up an interview with our potential client just to kind of discuss the case. And if we're in agreement that there are some bases upon which we can move forward, we're happy to do it. You know, I'm licensed in a number of circuit courts of appeal. I'm licensed in some district courts. But sometimes when, you know, these cases are arising in places where I'm not licensed, we're going to have to get local counsel on board, which I'm more than happy to do. But I mean, these are kind of involved cases. I mean, this is not something you just want to kind of haul off and file on your own and hope for the best. So that's kind of how we address these. Oftentimes what we're looking for are sentencing errors. You know, very rarely are we going to be looking to withdraw the guilty plea, you know, during a 2255 proceeding. But I think that 2255s are pretty good for raising sentencing issues. Especially because of the appellate waivers. So, for example, you know, you may have, you know, the district court judge may have made a mistake. Maybe you got more time than you thought that you would, but you're not allowed to appeal it, right, because you signed that appellate waiver. Well, you may want to think about, you know, raising a challenge under the 2255 statute by arguing something like, you know, your plea counsel, your sentencing counsel rendered ineffective assistance of counsel by not, you know, sort of better arguing that this particular enhancement didn't apply or this prior conviction shouldn't have been used in the way that it was. Maybe you want to challenge that you were designated as a career offender, that sort of thing. So those are the kinds of claims that we're typically looking at when we do these 2255s. That's a little bit about what our process is. If this is something that you think you may be interested in, I mean, please feel free to reach out to us. We'll be more than happy to answer any questions. Our telephone number here at the office is 803-445-1333. Thank you.