CA11: CoA granted on 2255 4A claim based on alleged prosecutorial misconduct

2255 appellant gets a certificate of appealability for the district court’s possible misapprehension of the Fourth Amendment issue he raised which included a prosecutorial misconduct claim. Jones v. United States, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 4629 (11th Cir. Feb. 27, 2024):

However, a COA is warranted as to the district court’s denial of Claim 4. Reasonable jurists would debate whether the district court violated Clisby v. Jones, 960 F.2d 925, 936, 938 (11th Cir. 1992) (en banc), when it construed Claim 4 as an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, but ignored Jones’s substantive argument that the government violated his constitutional rights by misrepresenting facts to obtain the warrants, which would amount to a violation of Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights. See Holmes v. Kucynda, 321 F.3d 1069, 1083 (11th Cir. 2003) (“[T]he Fourth Amendment requires that warrant applications contain sufficient information to establish probable cause.”); United States v. Novaton, 271 F.3d 968, 986 (11th Cir. 2001) (analyzing a Fourth Amendment challenge to the truthfulness of a warrant affidavit). This misconduct argument, while not entirely fleshed out, nevertheless appears to state a valid claim for relief, as Jones alleged governmental misconduct that violated his constitutional rights, independent of an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. See Spencer v. United States, 773 F.3d 1132, 1138 (11th Cir. 2014) (en banc) (holding that COA that fails to specify what constitutional issue jurists of reason would find debatable is deficient under § 2253(c)(3)).

Jones’s motion for leave to file an amended COA motion out of time is GRANTED. Additionally, a COA is GRANTED as to the following issue only:

Whether the district court violated Clisby v. Jones, 960 F.2d 925, 936 (11th Cir. 1992) (en banc), in denying Jones’s 28 U.S.C. § 2255 motion without addressing, as a substantive constitutional claim, his argument that the government committed prosecutorial misconduct by misrepresenting relevant information in order to obtain search and arrest warrants in his case.

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