In United States v. Stefan Eberhard Zappey, 164 F.4th 1348 (11th Cir. 2026) (Abudu, Rosenbaum, Wilson), the Court affirmed Zappey’s convictions for multiple counts of aggravated sexual abuse, and abusive sexual contact with children under 12. For 20 years, Zappey taught German language classes to children at an American school on a military base in Germany. In 2019 and 2020, four women alleged that Zappey had sexually assaulted them when they were students in his class. A subsequent military investigation concluded that Zappey had abused four students, under the age of 12, from 2006 to 2010. He was indicted accordingly, and exercised his right to a jury trial. Zappey's defense theory was that the women's memories of being abuse by Zappey as children were unreliable. After a 5-day trial, Zappey was convicted of all 8 counts, and he was later sentence to life imprisonment. Zappey claimed on appeal that the district court abused its discretion by limiting one of Zappey’s two childhood memory experts to trial testimony relating only to topics already covered by the government’s memory expert, and by entirely excluding Zappey’s second expert. The Court found no abuse of discretion as to the limitations on Zappey’s first expert [...]

In In re Bowe, No. 24-11704 (Feb. 6, 2026) (Ed Carnes, Grant, Wilson), the Eleventh Circuit granted Bowe’s request for authorization to file a second or successive 2255 motion challenging his 924(c) conviction based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Davis. This case was on remand from the Supreme Court, which held that the same-claim bar in 28 U.S.C. 2244(b)(1) did not apply to 2255 motions filed by federal prisoners, abrogating the Eleventh Circuit’s contrary precedent in In re Baptiste. Because the Eleventh Circuit had previously relied on 2244(b)(1) to deny Bowe authorization, the Supreme Court remanded for the Eleventh Circuit to consider his authorization request anew without considering 2244(b)(1). In that regard, the Eleventh Circuit held that Bowe made a prima facie showing satisfying the gatekeeping requirements in 2255(h)(2). The Eleventh Circuit had previously held that Davis announced a new rule of constitutional law made retractive by the Supreme Court. And the Court held that Bowe made a prima facie showing under Davis because neither of his 924(c) predicates—conspiracy and attempt to commit Hobbs Act robbery—qualified as “crime of violence” after the Supreme Court’s decisions in both Davis (invalidating 924(c)’s residual clause) and Taylor (holding that attempted Hobbs [...]

In United States v. Starr, 159 F.4th 901 (11th Cir. 2025) (Newsom, Jordan*, Honeywell (MDFL)), the Court affirmed the defendants’ interstate murder for hire convictions, in violation of 18 U.S.C. s. 1958, arising from the murder of Jason Starr’s ex-wife, Sara Starr. In affirming the murder for hire convictions, the Court also held: The district court not violate the brother’s constitutional right to present a defense by excluding evidence of an alternate perpetrator, who had a “complicated relationship” with the victim, made odd statements prior to his suicide, and had a motorcycle that could have been the one seen outside of Sara’s home in the days leading up to her murder, where the alternate perpetrator had an apparent alibi at the time of the murder, the defendants did not identify any accomplice that could have committed the murder for the alternate perpetrator, and, generally, there was an insufficient “nexus” between him and the murder, such that the district court correctly excluded this evidence under Rule 403. The district court properly admitted Sara Starr’s out-of-court statement that “he’s going to kill me” to the friend who had just helped her secretly move out of the home she had shared with [...]

In United States v. Keegan, No. 22-13019 (11th Cir. Dec. 17, 2025) (Grant, Newsom, Abudu), the Court affirmed Keegan’s conviction for CP production, after a conditional guilty plea preserving Keegan’s right to appeal the district court’s pre-trial evidentiary ruling. The district court had excluded a defense expert psychologist’s proffered testimony about Keegan’s post-indictment statements, made to that defense expert, that she had been abused by her husband (the recipient of the CP that Keegan produced). Keegan argued that the statement was made for medical diagnosis, and thus admissible as a hearsay exception under FRE 803(4). The district court concluded that Keegan recounted the abuse “to prepare the witness to testify to a jury”—not for “diagnosis or treatment” and thus her statements did not satisfy FRE 803(4). After an extensive parsing of Fed. R. Evidence 803(4), the Court found no clear error and no abuse of discretion in the district court’s ruling excluding Keegan’s statements to the defense expert: “Between the plain text of Rule 803(4), the background of the traditional rules regarding medical testimony, and the district court’s factual findings . . .  we agree with the district court that because Keegan’s allegations of abuse were not made “for” medical [...]

In United States v. Erica Kelley Day, No. 24-13312 (11th Cir. Dec. 23, 2025) (Pryor CJ, Lagoa, Kidd)—also a government appeal—the Court held that a district court, when considering a government motion to depart from a statutory minimum for substantial assistance on one count, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3553(e) & USSG 5K1.1,  may not depart as to another count that is not subject to the government’s § 3553(e) motion. The Court also held that the government had not breached the plea agreement by filing a 5K motion only as to one count, because the plea agreement “referred only to section 5K1.1 and Rule 35(b),” “silence is not ambiguity,” “no promise was made about filing a § 3553(e) motion,” and the agreement “confirmed the government’s discretion to determine ‘the extent of any such departure request.’” The Court thus vacated Day’s sentence as to the count for which no § 3553(e) motion was filed and remanded for resentencing. Kidd wrote a concurrence outlining Day’s extraordinary recovery, rehabilitation, and cooperation post-arrest. I recommend reading it in full (page 8-10 of the below PDF). Referring to Abudu’s Perez concurrence, Kidd agreed that the “asymmetry” in  § 3553(e) “warrants reflection,” and closed by noting [...]