This case presents a recurring and important ques- tion concerning the limits of incorporation-by-refer- ence doctrine at the Rule 12(b)(6) pleading stage. Fed- eral courts increasingly consider contracts, recordings, reports, videos, and other materials outside the com- plaint without converting motions to dismiss into summary-judgment proceedings under Rule 56. The courts of appeals, however, apply different approaches regarding the extent to which incorporated materials may be used to override well-pleaded allegations and competing inferences arising from exhibits attached to the complaint under Rule 10(c). Petitioners con- tend the decision below improperly resolved disputed contractual meaning and competing factual infer- ences against them before discovery.

Federal courts nevertheless increasingly invoke in- corporation-by-reference doctrine to consider docu- ments outside the complaint without converting mo- tions to dismiss into summary judgment proceedings under Rule 56. The courts of appeals are divided re- garding whether incorporated documents may be treated as substantively true and used to override con- trary factual allegations and plaintiff-attached Rule 10(c) exhibits, which adversely affects plaintiffs and results in persistent doctrinal inconsistency and con- fusion.

The questions presented are:

1. Whether, on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, a court may treat documents incorporated by reference as controlling over contrary factual allegations and ex- hibits attached to the complaint under Rule 10(c).

The Convention on the Recognition and Enforce- ment of Foreign Arbitral Awards (Convention), implemented by Chapter 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), see 9 U.S.C. §§ 201-208, governs enforce- ment of international arbitration agreements in federal court (to which it permits removal). In GE En- ergy Power Conversion France SAS, Corp. v. Outokumpu Stainless USA, LLC, 590 U.S. 4382, 445 (2020), the Court held that the Convention permits “enforcement of arbitration agreements by nonsigna- tories under domestic-law equitable estoppel doctrines.” But the Court reserved the question of “which body of law governs that determination.” Id.

The courts of appeals have split 4-1 over whether federal or state law governs that equitable estoppel in- quiry. Recognizing Congress’s desire to “unify the standards by which [international] agreements to ar- bitrate are observed” when it acceded to the Convention, see Scherk v. Alberto-Culver Co., 417 U.S. 506, 520 n.15 (1974), the First, Second, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits have held that federal common law supplies the relevant equitable estoppel principles. Here, in contrast, the Fifth Circuit held that when a party petitions to compel arbitration under the Con- vention, state law controls the equitable estoppel analysis.

The question presented is whether federal com- mon law or state law determines whether a nonsignatory to an arbitration agreement governed by the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards can use equitable estoppel principles to enforce the agreement.

If an alien reenters the United States without permission after removal, he faces up to two years 1n prison and one year on supervised release. 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). If, however, the alien’s removal followed a felony conviction, that fact raises the maximum punishment to ten years in prison and three years on supervised release. 8 U.S.C. § 1826(b)(1).

Is the existence of a pre-removal felony conviction an element of an enhanced offense that must be alleged in the indictment and either proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt or admitted during a defendant’s guilty plea?

ia

1. Whether 18 U.S.C. § 1346 honest-services fraud may rest on a theory that managed-care physicians are fiduciaries to their patients, where the United States persuaded this Court to adopt the contrary position in Pegram v. Herdrich, 530 U.S. 211 (2000), and the contradiction was undisclosed at every level of the proceedings below.

2. Whether Pegram’s holding that fiduciary doctrine “translates into no rule readily applicable to HMO decisions or those of any other variety of medical practice,” 530 U.S. at 233, forecloses § 1346 fiduciary liability for physicians operating within California’s constitutionally closed Workers’ Compensation Medical Provider Network — and whether the Ninth Circuit’s contrary holding in United States v. Solakyan, 119 F.4th 575 (9th Cir. 2024), conflicts with the Sixth Circuit en banc in Jackson v. Sedgwick Claims Management Services, Inc., 731 F.3d 556 (6th Cir. 2013).

3. Whether the Tenth Amendment, Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), and the McCarran-Ferguson Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1012(b), permit federal courts to impose common-law fiduciary duties on physicians within California’s Workers’ Compensation

| system — a system the State, by sovereign constitutional act under Article XIV, § 4, has expressly cleared of common-law content for over a century.

4. Whether the Fifth Amendment Grand Jury Clause, the Sixth Amendment right to jury

determination of every offense element, and Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347 (1964), forbid (a) trying a defendant on a theory the grand jury did not return; (b) instructing the jury on a state-law Travel Act predicate without including the operative statutory exception that the defendant’s conduct satisfied; and (c) applying a 2024 judicial expansion of § 1346 retroactively to 2008-2013 conduct.

PARTIES TO THE PROCEEDINGS |

Petitioner David Hobart Payne, M.D., was the defendant in the district court and the appellant in the court of appeals. Respondent United States of America was the plaintiff in the district court and the appellee in the court of appeals. :

RELATED PROCEEDINGS

• United States v. David Hobart Payne, M._D., No. 8:17-cr-00053-JLS (C.D. Cal.) (judgment of conviction; Hon. Josephine L. Staton).

1 .

At petitioner’s federal murder trial in 2009, Baltimore City Police Detective Wayne Jenkins testified against petitioner. A jury convicted petitioner, and the dis- trict court sentenced him to life imprisonment. After the district court’s judgment was affirmed on direct appeal in 2011, petitioner moved for post-conviction relief un- der 28 U.S.C. § 2255, which the district court denied in 2015. Petitioner’s original § 2255 motion did not raise a due process claim that Jenkins had committed perjury at trial. In 2017, Jenkins was charged in federal court with various offenses related to his widespread corruption and violent conduct as a police detective in Baltimore — what the district court in petitioner’s case described as “rampant.” In 2018, Jenkins was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment. In 2020, a book was published providing detailed information about Jenkins’ rampant corruption and per- jury. In 2021, petitioner filed a Rule 60(b) motion, seeking to raise a new claim that Jenkins had committed perjury at petitioner’s trial. The district court, concluding that evidence of Jenkins’ rampant corruption and perjury was not known to petitioner when the court denied § 2255 relief in 2015, granted petitioner relief under Rule 60(b) and permitted petitioner to raise a perjury claim. The district court denied the per- jury claim on the merits in 2022 and again, on reconsideration, in 2025. On appeal, citing Gonzalez v. Crosby, 545 U.S. 524 (2005), the Fourth Circuit vacated the district court’s judgment for lack of jurisdiction — concluding that the district court had erred by affording petitioner relief under Rule 60(b) and holding that petitioner’s perjury claim was barred by § 2255(h)’s limitation on second or successive claims.

In view of the foregoing, the question presented is:

Whether, when a member of the prosecution team concealed material

information that would have supported a constitutional claim during the

litigation of a defendant’s initial § 2255 motion, a district court may later

erant Rule 60(b) relief and permit the defendant to amend his original

motion and raise the new claim on the ground that the concealment un-

dermined the integrity of the initial § 2255 proceeding.

il

Whether Lake Andes, South Dakota — located on Yankton Sioux allotted lands within the boundaries of the reservation created by the Treaty with the Yankton Sioux, April 19, 1858, 11 Stat. 743 — constitutes Indian country under 18 U.S.C. § 1151, such that the State of South Dakota lacked jurisdiction to prosecute Petitioner, an enrolled tribal member, for offenses occurring there, where the South Dakota Supreme Court’s holding that allotted lands lose Indian country status upon conveyance to non-Indian ownership conflicts with this Court’s precedents including McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 894 (2020), and Solem v. Bartlett, 465 U.S. 463 (1984), which established only Congress can divest Indian country status through clear and explicit statutory language.

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1. Does 18 U.S.C. § 922(¢g)(1)’s lifetime ban on the possession of firearms by all felons violate the Second Amendment on its face and as applied to Jackson?

2. Can Congress criminalize intrastate possession of a firearm solely because it crossed state lines at some point before it came into a person’s possession?

Whether Petitioner was deprived of his right, under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, to a trial by a 12-person jury when the defendant is charged with a serious felony?

There is another petition raising the identical question presented, and in that case the Court has requested a response from the State of Florida. See Kian v. Florida, No. 25-6623. This case should at least be held pending resolution of that petition.

1

1. Whether a court of appeals, in denying a certificate of appealability in a 28 U.S.C. § 2254 case dismissed on procedural grounds, may rely solely on the merits formula of § 2253(c)(2) without separately determining whether jurists of reason could debate the correctness of the procedural ruling — the two-step inquiry required by Slack y. McDaniel, 529 U.S. 473 (2000), and Miller-El v. Cockrell, 5337 U.S. 322 (2003).

2. Whether a federal habeas claim is “fairly presented,” and any further state remedy “unavailable,” for purposes of exhaustion and procedural default, when the petitioner raised all of his federal grounds through the State’s only remaining vehicle — a discretionary successive-post-conviction gateway whose denial the State’s highest court will not review. |

Fy

When considering imposing a term of supervised release, a sentencing court must weigh the factors specified by 18 U.S.C. § 3583(c) while also considering U.S.8.G. § 5D1.1(c), which generally discourages applying supervised release to deportable defendants. Petitioner Roberto Godinez-Gomez, a deportable defendant, received a sentence including supervised release. In the decision below, the Fifth Circuit affirmed under plain-error review without requiring a_ case-specific explanation for supervised release. The court held that, even assuming error in imposing supervised release on a deportable defendant, Petitioner failed to show an effect on substantial rights. That approach permits recurring violations of § 5D1.1(c)’s deportable-defendant presumption to evade correction whenever the sentencing record is silent. The courts of appeals are divided in how they apply 18 U.S.C. § 35838(c) and U.S.8.G. § 5D1.1(c) to deportable defendants. Therefore, the question presented is as follows:

May appellate courts affirm, under plain-error review, the imposition of supervised release on a deportable defendant where the district court failed to provide the case-specific justification contemplated by U.S.8.G. § 5D1.1(c) and relied only on generalized sentencing rationales?

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