Larry Demond Williams v. USA

[DO NOT PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
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No. 13-15064
Non-Argument Calendar
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D.C. Docket Nos. 2:11-cv-08048-IPJ-JHE; 2:08-cr-00048-IPJ-RRA-2
LARRY DEMOND WILLIAMS,
Petitioner-Appellant,
versus
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Respondent-Appellee.
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Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Alabama
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(December 2, 2014)
Before WILLIAM PRYOR, MARTIN and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
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Larry Demond Williams, a federal prisoner, appeals pro se the dismissal of
his untimely motion to vacate. 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The district court ruled that
Williams was not entitled to equitable tolling of the one-year statute of limitation.
We affirm.
The district court did not err by dismissing Williams’s motion to vacate. A
movant “is entitled to equitable tolling only if he shows (1) that he has been
pursuing his rights diligently, and (2) that some extraordinary circumstance stood
in his way and prevented him from timely filing.” Holland v. Florida, 560 U.S.
631, 649, 130 S. Ct. 2549, 2562 (2010) (internal quotation marks and citation
omitted). Williams argued that prison violence thwarted him from preparing his
motion, but “lockdowns and periods in which a prisoner is separated from his legal
papers are not ‘extraordinary circumstances’ in which equitable tolling is
appropriate,” Dodd v. United States, 365 F.3d 1273, 1283 (11th Cir. 2004). And
even if we were to assume that the purported failure of Williams’s trial counsel to
respond to his requests for information about his appeal was an extraordinary
circumstance, the district court did not clearly err in finding that Williams failed to
pursue postconviction relief with diligence. Williams did not inquire about the
status of his direct appeal for more than year after it was filed, and after he learned
of that decision, he waited an additional two months before filing his motion to
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vacate. See San Martin v. McNeil, 633 F.3d 1257, 1270–71 (11th Cir. 2011).
Williams’s motion was untimely.
We AFFIRM the dismissal of Williams’s motion to vacate.
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