United States v. Adams

563 F. App'x 488
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedJuly 15, 2014
DocketNo. 13-1368
StatusPublished

This text of 563 F. App'x 488 (United States v. Adams) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Adams, 563 F. App'x 488 (7th Cir. 2014).

Opinion

ORDER

Charles Adams pleaded guilty to failing to register as a convicted sex offender, 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a). The district court imposed the statutory maximum sentence of 120 months’ imprisonment, a term that is more than double the high end of Adams’s guidelines range of 46 to 57 months. On appeal Adams contends that his above-guidelines sentence is substantively unreasonable. Because the court sufficiently explained the variance between the sentence imposed and Adams’s guidelines range, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

Adams, as a convicted sex offender, is required to register in any jurisdiction where he lives or works. He had last updated his residency in June 2010, when he told officials that he had moved from Allen County, Indiana, to Owen County, Indiana. He later notified Owen County three times between July and September 2010 that he was working out of state. Yet Adams did not notify the county that he began working in Menasha, Wisconsin, in October of that year, nor did he notify officials in Wisconsin that he was working in the state, as he was required to do.

Federal authorities discovered Adams’s unregistered status after he had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Neenah, Wisconsin. The woman reported to the police that she worked as an escort and agreed to meet Adams at a hotel. After she refused to engage in anal sex, she said, Adams tied her up, stuffed a pillowcase in her mouth, and sodomized her. He was charged with second degree sexual assault and false imprisonment, and he was in state custody when he was charged with the current federal offense.

The presentence report revealed Adams’s extensive criminal history, including several violent sexual offenses (although many of those crimes were too old to score any criminal history points). In 1986 when Adams was 19, he tied up, gagged, and raped a 12-year-old girl. He received a 10-year sentence with 8 of that suspended. And after serving 1 year he was released on probation. His probation was revoked less than two years later, however, after he was convicted of criminal confinement for tying up a woman and handcuffing her to a bed. While Adams was incarcerated for that offense, he attempted to escape, and he received an additional 6-1/2 years’ imprisonment. A year after he was released, in 1998, Adams was convicted of criminal trespass after he caused a disturbance at his wife’s job by yelling at her, the owner, and a customer, and refusing to leave. He received a 365-day suspended sentence. A few months later his wife reported that, after she had refused to have sex one night, he bound, gagged, and forcibly penetrated her. During the rape, she said, Adams poured whiskey over her nose, mouth, and face while she gagged, and then he struck her with the bottle. A jury returned guilty verdicts for the crimes of battery with a deadly weapon, criminal deviant conduct, and criminal confinement, and in 1999 he received a total of 16 years’ imprisonment. He was paroled in 2006, and the sentences were discharged in March 2009. Less [490]*490than two years later he was arrested for the assault in Wisconsin, leading to the case that is now before us.

Adams objected to the presentence report, opposing a proposed 6-level upward adjustment for committing a sex offense on an adult while not in registered status, see U.S.S.G. § 2A3.5(b)(1)(A). This increase rested on the pending charge in state court. Adams explained that he had pleaded not guilty to those charges, maintained that all the acts between him and the escort were consensual, and argued that the case boiled down to his word against the victim’s.

In response, the government submitted the transcript of the victim’s testimony at Adams’s preliminary hearing in Wisconsin circuit court and called one of the investigating officers to testify at the sentencing hearing. At the preliminary hearing the victim identified Adams at her assailant. She agreed that initially they had consensual intercourse. But then Adams wanted to switch to anal intercourse, and when she refused and began dressing to leave, he told her that she wasn’t going anywhere. She screamed, and Adams pushed her onto the bed and put her in a headlock until she couldn’t breathe. Then he used pillow cases and the belt from her jacket to tie her arms and legs. He then shoved his fingers in her anus and put his penis in her mouth. At sentencing, Sergeant Christine Walsh of the Neenah Police Department testified that the victim’s testimony at the preliminary hearing was consistent with the statement she had given the police and with what she said during her 911 call reporting the assault. Walsh added that the investigation revealed that Adams had solicited two prisoners to pay the victim $5,000 to change her story and another $5,000 if she did not testify at his trial.

The district court found by a preponderance of evidence that Adams had committed a sex act while not registered and added 6 levels to his base offense level of 16, see U.S.S.G. § 2A3.5(a)(1), (b)(1)(A). With a 3-level decrease for accepting responsibility, see U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1, the court calculated a total offense level of 19 and criminal history category of IV, yielding a guidelines imprisonment range of 46 to 57 months. Adams advocated for a within-guidelines sentence, and the government requested a 57-month sentence.

The district judge pointed out that he was authorized to impose up to 10 years’ imprisonment and offered this assessment:

If ten years is ever appropriate, it seems to me it is in this case. I look at the history here, I look at this defendant, I look at the failure to register aggravated by the commission of a sexual assault while unregistered, and I conclude that a sentence of 120 months in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons is appropriate, and that’s the sentence I impose.

The judge explained that normally he puts great weight on the parties’ recommendations, but this time, he thought, a guidelines sentence would be unreasonable. Adams’s pending case in Wisconsin was an aggravating factor in this offense, the court reasoned, because the purpose of registration is “to allow the public to know who you’re dealing with,” and Adams, by not registering, had “successfully avoided” detection by the escort. The court added that Adams’s criminal history had begun at age 19 and involved serious offenses. Adams, the court concluded, is “a very dangerous person ... who at best is disturbed” but more likely just has no regard “for others, particularly for women.”

Adams limits his appeal to challenging the substantive reasonableness of his above-guidelines sentence. Because the district court heavily relied on Adams’s criminal history as a factor for imposing a sentence above the guidelines range, [491]*491Adams contends, the judge should have referenced U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 — a policy statement that provides guidance for variances if the defendant’s criminal history is inadequately represented — to determine the extent of the variance. If the district court had done so — by incrementally moving across the sentencing table — the court would have had to move up to a total offense level of 24 and criminal history category of VI to obtain a 120-month sentence, see U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3(a)(4). Adams also contends thát the district court erred by considering the pending Wisconsin charges because the court already had accounted for the state case by tacking on 6 offense levels during the guidelines calculations.

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Bluebook (online)
563 F. App'x 488, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-adams-ca7-2014.