United States of America v. Rashawn D. Watson

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION
File Name: 20a0415n.06
No. 19-3658
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
RASHAWN D. WATSON,
Defendant-Appellant.
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)
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)
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)
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ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED
STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR
THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF
OHIO
BEFORE: MOORE, CLAY, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.
MURPHY, Circuit Judge. Federal law prohibits certain categories of individuals from
possessing firearms, including individuals who have been convicted of a felony. 18 U.S.C.
§§ 922(g)(1), 924(a)(2). Before 2019, our court and most others had long held that this law’s
intent element required defendants to know only that they were in possession of a firearm. See,
e.g., United States v. Conley, 802 F. App’x 919, 922 (6th Cir. 2020). In Rehaif v. United States,
139 S. Ct. 2191 (2019), however, the Supreme Court clarified that defendants must additionally
know that they fall within one of the categories of individuals who may not possess firearms. Id.
at 2194. After Rehaif, therefore, those charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm must
know both that they possessed the firearm and that they had previously been convicted of a felony.
This case arose before Rehaif. Rashawn Watson was indicted for, among other crimes,
being a felon in possession of a firearm. He ultimately pleaded guilty. But neither his indictment

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No. 19-3658, United States v. Watson
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nor his plea agreement mentioned whether Watson knew of his status as a felon—as is now
required by Rehaif. On appeal, Watson seeks to invoke that decision to overturn his guilty plea.
Because we recently rejected a challenge largely identical to Watson’s, see United States v. Hobbs,
953 F.3d 853, 856–58 (6th Cir. 2020), we affirm.
Three times in early 2018, Watson sold fentanyl at his tobacco business to a confidential
informant. These controlled buys led investigators to get a warrant to search Watson’s store, truck,
and nearby stash house. Investigators found three firearms, ammunition, and illegal drugs.
An indictment charged Watson with three drug counts, see 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), with
being a felon in possession of a firearm, see 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), and with possessing a firearm in
furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, see id. § 924(c)(1). The felon-in-possession count
specified that Watson had previously been convicted of three felonies and that he knowingly
possessed three firearms and ammunition. This count did not specify that Watson knew that he
had previously been convicted of those felonies.
In May 2019, shortly before the Supreme Court issued Rehaif, Watson pleaded guilty to all
five counts. His plea agreement did not require him to admit that he knew of his felon status, but
he did admit that he knowingly possessed the firearms and ammunition. During the plea colloquy,
the district court likewise did not ask Watson to admit that he knew of his status as a felon at the
time that he possessed the firearms.
At sentencing, the district court found that Watson qualified as a career offender under
U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1. This career-offender designation meant that Watson’s guidelines range was
262 to 327 months in prison. Varying substantially downward from that range, the district court
sentenced Watson to 190 months in prison, followed by six years of supervised release. Although

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No. 19-3658, United States v. Watson
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Watson’s sentencing occurred after Rehaif, he never asserted any type of Rehaif claim in the
district court.
On appeal, Watson challenged both his career-offender enhancement and his felon-in-
possession conviction. We have already granted the government’s motion to dismiss Watson’s
career-offender claim because his plea agreement included an appeal waiver that barred him from
asserting it. See United States v. Watson, No. 19-3658 (6th Cir. Mar. 3, 2020) (order). We thus
need only consider Watson’s Rehaif arguments. He contends that Rehaif requires us to vacate his
felon-in-possession conviction for both jurisdictional and merits reasons. After Watson filed his
opening brief, our decision in Hobbs rejected the same types of arguments. 953 F.3d at 856–58.
Hobbs leads us to affirm in this case too.
1. Jurisdictional Challenge. According to Watson, the indictment’s failure to allege the
Rehaif-required element (that he knew of his status as a felon) deprived the district court of
jurisdiction to convict him of a felon-in-possession offense. Not so. Based on United States v.
Cotton, 535 U.S. 625 (2002), Hobbs already explained why a missing element in an indictment
does not affect a federal court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. See 953 F.3d at 856–57. The Supreme
Court has repeatedly clarified in recent decades that the word “jurisdiction” has a narrow domain,
referring to “the courts’ statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate the case.” Cotton, 535 U.S.
at 630 (quoting Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env’t, 523 U.S. 83, 89 (1998)); see, e.g., Eberhart
v. United States, 546 U.S. 12, 16 (2005) (per curiam). Consistent with this caselaw, Cotton held
that “defects in an indictment” are not jurisdictional because they do not deprive courts of their
power to adjudicate a criminal case. 535 U.S. at 630. That power instead arises from a federal
statute that gives district courts jurisdiction over “all offenses against the laws of the United
States.” 18 U.S.C. § 3231; see Cotton, 535 U.S. at 630–31.

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Hobbs applied Cotton’s logic to a defective felon-in-possession indictment that omitted
Rehaif’s knowledge-of-status element. 953 F.3d at 856–57. When doing so, Hobbs recognized
that other courts had “rejected the notion that an indictment’s failure to allege the ‘knowledge-of-
status’ element required by Rehaif deprives the court of jurisdiction.” Id. (citing United States v.
Balde, 943 F.3d 73, 92 (2d Cir. 2019); United States v. Burghardt, 939 F.3d 397, 402 (1st Cir.
2019)). Since Hobbs, courts have continued to reject this notion. See United States v. Maez, 960
F.3d 949, 956 (7th Cir. 2020); United States v. Espinoza, __ F. App’x __, 2020 WL 2844542, at
*1 (9th Cir. June 1, 2020) (mem.); United States v. Moore, 954 F.3d 1322, 1332–37 (11th Cir.
2020). Just as in Hobbs and these many other cases, any deficiency in Watson’s indictment “did
not deprive the district court of jurisdiction.” 953 F.3d at 857.
In response, Watson asks us to revisit Hobbs. But a panel of this court may not overrule a
previous panel’s published opinion. Watson should direct any disagreement with Hobbs to our en
banc court, see, e.g., Salmi v. Sec’y of Health & Human Servs., 774 F.2d 685, 689 (6th Cir. 1985),
and he should direct any disagreement with Cotton to the Supreme Court, see, e.g., Agostini v.
Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 237 (1997).
2. Merits Challenge. Watson makes two Rehaif arguments on the merits. He initially
asserts that the indictment’s failure to allege Rehaif’s knowledge-of-status element rendered it
defective because indictments must include all elements of an offense. See United States v.
Resendiz-Ponce, 549 U.S. 102, 107 (2007). Watson next argues that his plea was unknowing and
involuntary (and so unconstitutional) because the district court failed to inform him of this element
and to ensure he knew of his status as a felon when he possessed the firearms. See Bousley v.
United States, 523 U.S. 614, 618–19 (1998).

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Watson did not raise these arguments in the district court, so we review them for plain
error. See Hobbs, 953 F.3d at 857; Conley, 802 F. App’x at 922; see also Maez, 960 F.3d at 957.
To prevail on plain-error review, Watson must identify “an ‘(1) error (2) that was obvious or clear,
(3) that affected [his] substantial rights and (4) that affected the fairness, integrity, or public
reputation of the judicial proceedings.’” Hobbs, 953 F.3d at 857 (citation omitted). As we did in
Hobbs, we will resolve Watson’s claims on the third (prejudice) prong of this plain-error test. “An
error affects a defendant’s substantial rights if there is a reasonable probability that, but for the
error, the outcome of the proceeding would have been different.” Id. (quoting Molina-Martinez v.
United States, 136 S. Ct. 1338, 1343 (2016)) (internal quotation marks omitted). This test thus
requires Watson to show “a reasonable probability that, but for the alleged failure to inform him
of [Rehaif’s] knowledge-of-status element, he would not have entered the plea.” Id. (quoting
United States v. Dominguez-Benitez, 542 U.S. 74, 76 (2004)) (alteration omitted). A defendant
may satisfy this burden by pointing to “contemporaneous evidence suggest[ing] that he would have
rejected the plea deal[.]” Id.
Watson does not make this showing. On appeal, he has not even argued that he would have
stood trial if the government had to prove that he knew of his felon status, nor has he pointed to
any contemporaneous evidence suggesting that he would have done so. Moreover, as in Hobbs,
“[p]utting the government to its burden of proof would have cost [Watson] the potential benefit of
his plea without gaining him anything.” Id. at 858 (alteration and citation omitted). Thus, he does
not show a reasonable probability that the outcome of the proceeding would have been different
absent the Rehaif error.
Watson’s response does not change things. He cites a footnote from Dominguez-Benitez
suggesting that an unconstitutional guilty plea without a plea colloquy explaining the rights that a

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defendant was waiving could not “be saved even by overwhelming evidence that the defendant
would have pleaded guilty regardless.” 542 U.S. at 84 n.10 (discussing Boykin v. Alabama, 395
U.S. 238, 243 (1969)). Relying on this footnote, the Fourth Circuit has held that a district court’s
failure to notify a defendant of Rehaif’s knowledge-of-status element at a plea hearing qualifies as
“structural error” that automatically meets the plain-error test’s prejudice prong. See United States
v. Gary, 954 F.3d 194, 202–07 (4th Cir. 2020). In Hobbs, however, we held that a defendant who
pleads guilty must show prejudice from a district court’s failure to explain Rehaif’s knowledge-
of-status element. See 953 F.3d at 857–58. We nowhere suggested that such a failure could qualify
as structural error. Id.; cf. Ruelas v. Wolfenbarger, 580 F.3d 403, 410–11 (6th Cir. 2009); United
States v. Stewart, 306 F.3d 295, 318–23 (6th Cir. 2002). Watson’s argument is incompatible with
Hobbs.
In addition, most other circuit courts agree with Hobbs’s approach. Several have expressly
rejected the argument that a district court’s failure to notify a defendant of Rehaif’s knowledge-of-
status element at a plea hearing counts as structural error. See, e.g., United States v. Coleman, 961
F.3d 1024, 1028–30 (8th Cir. 2020); United States v. Trujillo, 960 F.3d 1196, 1201–08 (10th Cir.
2020); United States v. Hicks, 958 F.3d 399, 401 (5th Cir. 2020). Others have, like Hobbs, rejected
Rehaif arguments under the prejudice prong of the plain-error test. See United States v. McLellan,
958 F.3d 1110, 1120 (11th Cir. 2020); United States v. Williams, 946 F.3d 968, 973–74 (7th Cir.
2020); Burghardt, 939 F.3d at 403–05.
We affirm.

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