United States v. Kearn, No. 22-3068 (10th Cir. 2022)
Annotate this CaseUnder Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156 (2012), for constitutional violations, district courts may require the government to reoffer a rejected plea if the defendant rejected it because of ineffective assistance of counsel. A federal jury convicted Jonathan Kearn of three charges arising from his photographing and distributing pornographic images of his four-year-old daughter. The district court sentenced Kearn to 292 months’ imprisonment, the low end of the advisory range set forth in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. Kearn appealed his conviction and sentence, asserting multiple issues, including ineffective assistance of counsel. The Tenth Circuit affirmed after determining that “the evidence of Kearn’s guilt was overwhelming” and doubting that “even absent any of Kearn’s alleged errors, the outcome of the trial would have been different.” But the Court left unresolved Kearn’s ineffective-assistance claims, treating them as premature and properly raised “in collateral proceedings, not on direct appeal.” Kearn then brought his ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 to collaterally attack his sentence and seek a resentencing as relief. Kearn’s § 2255 Motion to Vacate, Set Aside, or Correct Sentence claimed that his trial counsel performed deficiently by inadequately explaining the government’s plea offer to him. In an amended motion, Kearn alleged that he had declined to accept the plea offer because his trial counsel had advised him that he “would essentially be lying to the Court and thus committing perjury by accepting responsibility for criminal actions he had no part of.” The trial court’s limited knowledge about the parties’ plea negotiations spurred it to ask the parties for additional information to better evaluate Kearn’s § 2255 motion. The district court later issued a written order granting Kearn’s § 2255 motion, concluding that “the totality of trial counsel’s legal advice during the plea process fell below an objective standard of reasonableness.” The Government appealed, but finding that the Government's appeal was not from a final judgment, the Tenth Circuit concluded it lacked jurisdiction to take on the Lafler issue, and remanded the case for further proceedings.
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