United States v. Charlie Holley, No. 24-11843 (11th Cir. Feb 3, 2026)
On the morning of June 21, 2021, Charlie Holley barricaded himself inside his Florida City townhouse in the grip of what would later be documented as a severe psychotic episode. Four days earlier, he had begun experiencing what he believed were electrical currents and microwave signals being directed at him by law enforcement. He unplugged his appliances, built interior barricades, and came to believe that his mail had been tampered with to sabotage him. By the time events came to a head, Holley was armed with a loaded, scoped Hi-Point assault rifle. Charlotte Wicker — a USPS mail carrier who had delivered on Holley’s route for a decade — arrived to drop off a package addressed to «Whitey White,» Holley’s nickname. When she refused his demand to open it, he trained the rifle on her and ordered her to move around her postal vehicle. She complied until she could reach the driver’s door, then drove away. Approximately forty feet down the street, she stopped and called 911. While she was on the line, she reported hearing something strike the truck. A later examination confirmed a single bullet hole in the rear bumper.Police and the Miami-Dade Priority Response Team arrived to find an armed, barricaded suspect. After about two hours and the deployment of a Special Response Team with an armored vehicle, Holley surrendered peacefully. Inside the townhouse, officers recovered the scoped rifle, loaded magazines, spent casings, and a mangled microwave on the driveway.
The government charged Holley on five counts: attempted murder of a federal employee (18 U.S.C. §§ 1114(3) and 1113); assaulting a federal employee (18 U.S.C. § 111(a)(1) and (b)); brandishing and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence (18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(A)(ii) and (iii)); and two counts of possessing a firearm and ammunition as a convicted felon (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)).
The road to trial was long. The Defense sought a psychiatric evaluation, and the magistrate judge found Holley incompetent to stand trial after the first assessment concluded his behavior was «potentially consistent with psychosis.» A second evaluation reached the same conclusion. Only a third evaluation — conducted after more than two years of inpatient federal psychiatric treatment — found that Holley’s symptoms no longer impaired his ability to understand the proceedings or assist in his own defense. A competency hearing followed, and the magistrate judge found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Holley was competent to proceed.
At trial, Holley mounted pretrial challenges to five evidentiary exhibits: four clips of body-worn camera footage capturing bystander statements to responding officers, and a recording of an anonymous 911 call made by an unidentified male who claimed to be Holley’s brother. He argued all five were inadmissible hearsay, violated Rule 403’s balancing test, and were admitted in violation of the Confrontation Clause. The district court overruled the objections, gave a limiting instruction to the jury, and allowed the exhibits. After a four-day trial, the jury acquitted Holley of attempted murder but convicted him on all four remaining counts.
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed admission of all four body-cam clips. The bystanders’ statements — pointing police toward Holley’s townhouse, identifying the suspect as a light-skinned man who «was out the window with a stick,» and in one clip providing Holley’s full name — were offered not to prove the truth of what the bystanders said, but to explain the officers’ investigative decisions: why they established a perimeter where they did, why they evacuated the neighbors they did, and why they focused their response on Holley’s unit specifically. Because the statements were offered for their effect on the listeners rather than for truth, they were not hearsay under FRE 801(c) and, critically, they did not implicate the Confrontation Clause at all. As the court explained, the Clause bars only the introduction of hearsay — statements offered for truth — and where truthfulness is not at issue, «the need to test an absent witness ebbs.» Smith v. Arizona, 602 U.S. 779 (2024).
The court also dispatched Holley’s Rule 403 argument. Rule 403 is an «extraordinary remedy» used «sparingly,» and the balance should be struck toward admissibility. The clips were short (each under two minutes), three did not name Holley at all, and the district court’s thorough limiting instruction — followed by verbal confirmation from the jury — further neutralized any prejudice risk. The court also declined to adopt the Fifth Circuit’s rule from United States v. Hamann, 33 F.4th 759 (5th Cir. 2022), which holds that statements specifically linking a defendant to a crime are inherently offered for truth regardless of the non-hearsay rationale. [Note: this 5th Circuit case is based upon on old-5th Circuit law that continues to bind the 11th Circuit but the court decided to disregard]. Even assuming the footage was admitted for truth, the court said, the bystanders’ statements were plainly nontestimonial under Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813 (2006), and Michigan v. Bryant, 562 U.S. 344 (2011). The officers faced a fluid, violent, unfolding emergency: an active armed shooter of unknown identity, barricaded in a residential neighborhood, with victims still in the area. The informal exchanges with bystanders were aimed at resolving that crisis, not building a prosecution record.
The anonymous 911 call presented a harder question because, unlike the body-cam footage, the government admitted it served a dual purpose: explaining the police response and corroborating Wicker’s account. That second purpose — bolstering the mail carrier’s testimony that Holley shot at her truck — meant the call was being offered, at least in part, for the truth of the matter asserted. A hearsay exception was therefore required. The court found one: the present sense impression exception under FRE 803(1). The call was placed at 1:27 PM and lasted only one minute. Wicker’s own 911 call — during which she reported hearing something strike her vehicle — was already in progress at 1:21 PM. The two calls overlapped in real time, and the anonymous caller’s language was grammatically present-tense: «he’s walking around with a semi-automatic rifle.» That syntax strongly indicated the caller was describing conduct he was observing as he spoke, not recounting something that had already ended. On the issue of the caller’s anonymity, the court declined to create a categorical identification requirement. The Eleventh Circuit has never imposed one, and Holley cited no authority requiring it. Where the timing and substance of the statement independently support reliability, the absence of a name is not fatal to admissibility.
As to sentencing, Defense counsel sought a significant downward variance to 161 months, arguing that Holley’s documented mental health crisis and delusional state at the time of the offense substantially mitigated his culpability. The government pushed for the high end, contending his behavior was more likely drug-induced than psychiatric in origin. The district court rejected both positions in part. It expressly rejected the government’s drug theory, found that Holley was «clearly in a moment of crisis» on the day of the offense, and acknowledged that the record left no room to doubt his «very challenging mental state at the time.» But the court also declined the variance, concluding that the seriousness of the offense and Holley’s lengthy criminal record weighed against it. The court sentenced Holley to 192 months — at the low end of the range — and explained that the mental health history was precisely the reason it was not going to the top.
On appeal, Holley argued that the district court failed to give sufficient weight to his mental illness. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed. Under Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38 (2007), a sentence is reviewed for reasonableness under a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard. A sentence is substantively unreasonable only if the court failed to consider a relevant factor, gave weight to an improper one, or committed a clear error of judgment. The record showed the court considered mental health extensively, discussed it twice during the sentencing hearing, and used it to anchor the sentence at the bottom rather than the top of the range. What the law requires is consideration — not the particular weight the defendant would have preferred.
https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202411843.pdf (Marcus, Wilson, Jones*)