John A. Mandacina v. FREDERICK ENTZEL, Warden, Federal Correctional Institution, Pekin

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 20-1027
J OHN A. MANDACINA,
Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
FREDERICK ENTZEL, Warden, Federal Correctional Institution,
Pekin,
Respondent-Appellee.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of Illinois.
No. 18-cv-1453-SLD — Sara Darrow, Chief Judge.
____________________
ARGUED O CTOBER 1, 2020 — DECIDED MARCH 12, 2021
____________________
Before EASTERBROOK, M ANION, and ROVNER, Circuit Judg-
es.
E ASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. John Mandacina paid Patrick
McGuire $25,000 to kill a potential witness in a federal crim-
inal case. His role in the murder was uncovered, and he was
sentenced to life imprisonment after a jury found him guilty.
The opinion affirming his conviction and sentence provides
details. United States v. McGuire, 45 F.3d 1177 (8th Cir. 1995).

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2 No. 20-1027
Mandacina filed and lost a collateral aback under 28
U.S.C. §2255. While an appeal from that decision was pend-
ing, he abempted to add a contention that the prosecutor
had failed to produce information that one of the witnesses
at trial—FBI agent Daniel Craft—had commibed misconduct
in other cases. The Eighth Circuit affirmed without discuss-
ing this contention. Mandacina v. United States, 328 F.3d 995
(8th Cir. 2003). Mandacina then requested permission to
pursue a second collateral challenge under §2255 based on
information about Craft. The Eighth Circuit denied this re-
quest without much explanation. Mandacina v. United States,
No. 05-2186 (8th Cir. June 8, 2005).
More than 13 years later, Mandacina filed this proceeding
seeking a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. §2241. He
requests collateral relief based on the same considerations
presented to the Eighth Circuit in 2003 and 2005. The district
court denied the petition, ruling that it is blocked by
§2255(e), which says that the writ of habeas corpus is una-
vailable “unless it also appears that the remedy by motion
[under §2255] is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality
of his detention.”
Mandacina does not contend that Craft engaged in mis-
conduct while investigating or testifying in his prosecution.
He maintains only that Craft commibed misconduct in other
cases—Craft misrepresented the results of a polygraph ex-
amination and on a different occasion misfiled the report of
an interview—and that he could have used that information
to impeach Craft’s testimony in his case. He describes this as
a claim based on Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972),
which it is not. Giglio dealt with a prosecutor who had sub-
orned perjury by inducing a witness to lie under oath. Man-

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No. 20-1027 3
dacina does not contend that he has any evidence implying
that Craft lied on the stand during his trial. Indeed, he does
not contend that the prosecutors knew of Craft’s miscon-
duct. His claim therefore rests on United States v. Bagley, 473
U.S. 667, 676 (1985), which extended Brady v. Maryland, 373
U.S. 83 (1963), from directly exculpatory to impeaching in-
formation. See also Strickler v. Greene, 527 U.S. 263 (1999).
From now on, we describe Mandacina’s contention as a
Brady claim.
His principal problem, which the district judge deemed
insurmountable, is that Brady claims are made and decided
under §2255 routinely. There is nothing “inadequate or in-
effective” about §2255 from that perspective. See Lee v. Wat-
son, 964 F.3d 663, 665, 667 (7th Cir. 2020). Mandacina himself
actually presented this Brady claim under §2255: once by an
effort to add issues during an appeal, and again by a request
for permission to file a second §2255 motion. He presented a
different Brady claim that the Eighth Circuit rejected on the
merits in 2003. 382 F.3d at 1000–02.
That Mandacina did not succeed does not make §2255 in-
adequate or ineffective; it takes a structural problem in §2255
to merit that description. See, e.g., Higgs v. Watson, 984 F.3d
1235, 1239–40 (7th Cir. 2021); Bourgeois v. Watson, 977 F.3d
620, 633 (7th Cir. 2020); Purkey v. United States, 964 F.3d 603,
614–15 (7th Cir. 2020); Webster v. Daniels, 784 F.3d 1123, 1136
(7th Cir. 2015) (en banc). Nor is a prisoner entitled to review
under §2241 just because the court that resolved motions
under §2255 did not write an opinion. We do not use §2241
to regulate how our colleagues in other circuits handle their
business. See Vialva v. Watson, 975 F.3d 664, 665–66 (7th Cir.
2020).

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4 No. 20-1027
According to Mandacina, §2255 is structurally deficient
as applied to all Brady claims, because the evidence showing
a violation of Brady almost always comes to light years after
the trial. That’s a considerable overstatement; we see many
Brady claims based on evidence discovered soon after trial.
And §2255(f)(4) makes allowance for late-discovered evi-
dence. It restarts the one-year time for collateral review on
“the date on which the facts supporting the claim or claims
presented could have been discovered through the exercise
of due diligence.” Mandacina’s problem is not that §2255 is
unavailable for Brady claims, but that he squandered the one
§2255 proceeding allowed as of right. That brought into play
the limit on second or successive petitions.
The limits on second or successive §2255 motions have
exceptions of their own. One appears in §2255(h)(1): a fur-
ther §2255 motion is allowed when it contains “newly dis-
covered evidence that, if proven and viewed in light of the
evidence as a whole, would be sufficient to establish by clear
and convincing evidence that no reasonable factfinder
would have found the movant guilty of the offense”. If
Craft’s testimony had been essential to the conviction, and
he had commibed misconduct in this case rather than some
other, that description might be apt. But his testimony was
not essential (as the Eighth Circuit’s opinion on direct appeal
shows), and Mandacina does not contend that any of Craft’s
misconduct affected the investigation of this case. So Man-
dacina cannot meet the threshold in §2255(h)(1), but this just
shows that he cannot obtain relief, not that there’s a struc-
tural flaw. The high threshold in §2255(h)(1) reflects a legis-
lative judgment that merely impeaching evidence—the sort
of evidence that Mandacina wants to present—falls short of

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No. 20-1027 5
the grave constitutional flaws that could justify multiple
rounds of collateral review.
None of the decisions in this circuit holds that a desire to
present impeaching evidence in a second or successive pro-
ceeding identifies a structural flaw in §2255. Our cases per-
mit use of §2241 to deal with genuinely fundamental prob-
lems—for example, ineligibility for the death penalty in Web-
ster, or actual innocence in In re Davenport, 147 F.3d 605 (7th
Cir. 1998). It would take a dramatic revision of this circuit’s
precedents to treat lack of access to impeachment material as
exposing a structural flaw in §2255. See Webster, 784 F.3d at
1136: “[S]omething more than a lack of success with a sec-
tion 2255 motion must exist before the savings clause is sat-
isfied.” Our more recent decisions, such as Lee, Purkey, and
Higgs, repeat this observation. See also Higgs v. Watson, No.
21-1073 (7th Cir. Jan. 15, 2021) (nonprecedential disposition
holding that a Brady claim does not permit use of §2241).
What is more, by waiting 15 years between discovering
Craft’s misconduct and first making a Brady claim under
§2241 (and 13 years after the claim’s definitive rejection by
the Eighth Circuit), Mandacina vastly exceeded the one-year
window opened by §2255(f)(4) for newly discovered evi-
dence. Although §2255(f)(4) applies only to §2255, and not to
§2241, access to the writ of habeas corpus has always been
limited by equitable principles. This was the basis of the
“abuse of the writ” doctrine that prevailed before the
amendments to §2255 in 1996. (We recognize that the doc-
trine of abuse of the writ no longer applies to litigation un-
der §2255, see Burris v. Parke, 95 F.3d 465, 469 (7th Cir. 1996)
(en banc), but it retains vitality when a prisoner seeks relief
under §2241.) Someone who waits until a retrial would be

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6 No. 20-1027
impossible has abused the writ. See Williams v. Sims, 390 F.3d
958, 961–62 (7th Cir. 2004); Higgason v. Clark, 984 F.2d 203,
206 (7th Cir. 1993). This crime was commibed more than 30
years ago. Mandacina’s delay independently precludes the
relief he seeks now.
Finally, Mandacina’s contention that any limit on §2241
unconstitutionally suspends the writ of habeas corpus con-
flicts with decisions holding that the Suspension Clause does
not entitle anyone to successive collateral abacks on a crimi-
nal judgment. See Felker v. Turpin, 518 U.S. 651, 663–64
(1996); Swain v. Pressley, 430 U.S. 372 (1977); cf. United States
v. Hayman, 342 U.S. 205 (1952). See also Lindh v. Murphy, 96
F.3d 856, 867–68 (7th Cir. 1996) (en banc), vacated on other
grounds, 521 U.S. 320 (1997). One opportunity for one round
of review suffices.
AFFIRMED

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