United States v. Carlos Urbina-Fuentes

900 F.3d 687
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit·Decided August 20, 2018·No. 17-40425·Published·Cited by 21 cases

Opinion

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge:

An able district court judge, without objection from defense counsel, relied on the wrong version of the Sentencing Guidelines-thereby generating the wrong sentencing range-in sentencing Urbina-Fuentes. Finding the error was plain, we vacate and remand for resentencing.

I.

The facts are straightforward. Carlos Urbina-Fuentes is a Honduran national who waded the Rio Grande and was detained by federal agents at a ranch in Laredo, Texas. He had unlawfully entered the United States twice before: once in 2004 and once in 2013, entries Urbina-Fuentes characterizes as part of a struggle to support a wife and seven young children in Honduras.

As the previous unlawful entries ended in deportations, 1 Urbina-Fuentes was charged in a one-count indictment for reentering the United States after a deportation, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326 (a). He pleaded guilty, accepting responsibility and admitting to the factual basis provided by the government. Urbina-Fuentes had prior convictions-as relevant here, a 2009 conviction for attempted burglary of an occupied dwelling under the applicable Florida statute. And when apprehended in 2013, he was convicted of unlawful reentry after deportation.

The process by which Urbina-Fuentes was sentenced for his latest illegal reentry lies in the heart of this case. The Probation Office submitted Urbina-Fuentes's Pre-Sentence Report on February 16, 2017, correctly recognizing that a court must ordinarily "use the Guidelines Manual in effect on the date that the defendant is sentenced," 2 which, for Urbina-Fuentes, is the 2016 edition of the Guidelines.

The Ex Post Facto Clause prohibits raising a defendant's sentencing range higher than it would be if it were calculated under the edition in place at the time of a defendant's criminal conduct. 3 For Urbina-Fuentes-whose *691 last "overt act [in this case] occurred on February 8, 2016"-this is the 2015 edition. So the Probation Office sought to determine whether applying the 2016 edition of the Guidelines would increase the sentencing range beyond the 2015 edition. It concluded that "the 2016 amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines have been reviewed and no ex post facto issues have been identified."

The Probation Office then calculated Urbina-Fuentes's offense level using the 2016 Guidelines. Under that edition, the baseline offense level for illegal reentry is eight, and the Probation Office added two four-point enhancements-one for Urbina-Fuentes's illegal reentry conviction in 2013, 4 and one for his attempted burglary of a dwelling conviction in Florida in 2009. 5 The Probation Office also gave Urbina-Fuentes a three-level reduction for acceptance of responsibility, 6 generating the total offense level of thirteen. It then calculated a criminal history score of nine, relying on the same two previous convictions and adding a set of Florida misdemeanor convictions for battery and criminal mischief, arising from a violent altercation between Urbina-Fuentes, his girlfriend, and several others. 7 It also took into account that Urbina-Fuentes was still on supervised release from his 2013 illegal reentry conviction. The combination of the two scores yielded a sentencing range of 24 to 30 months. Urbina-Fuentes made two objections to the Pre-Sentence Report's recommendations-neither concerned the Probation Office's use of the 2016 Guidelines.

On April 18, 2017, Urbina-Fuentes was sentenced to 30 months of imprisonment and a three-year term of supervised release. 8 In issuing the sentence, the court offered an increasingly rote explanation: it had "considered a sentence at the Guideline's range above and below it and ... [found] that this sentence is appropriate under the circumstances[,] and [it] would make this sentence irrespective of the Guideline range." Once again, no objection to the court's use of the 2016 Guidelines was raised at the sentencing hearing.

II.

Urbina-Fuentes urges that the 2016 Guidelines produced a higher sentencing range than the 2015 Guidelines in effect at the time of his criminal conduct. Because Urbina-Fuentes never objected on this basis below, we turn to the plain error framework. 9 A finding of plain error requires Urbina-Fuentes to make four showings: 1. there must have been an error; 2. that was plain; 3. that affected the defendant's substantial rights; and 4. that "seriously affects the fairness, integrity, or *692 public reputation of judicial proceedings." 10 If the first three prongs have been met, "the court of appeals has the discretion to correct [the error] but no obligation to do so" under the fourth prong. 11 That discretion has recently been cabined by the Court, however; it recently explained that "[i]n the ordinary case, ... the failure to correct a plain Guidelines error that affects a defendant's substantial rights will seriously affect the fairness, integrity, and public reputation of judicial proceedings." 12

III.

The government does not dispute that the court committed error by using the 2016 Guidelines. We outline that error here, before turning to its "plainness." It is settled that the Ex Post Facto Clause is violated when a sentencing court uses a Guidelines edition generating a higher sentencing range than the range of the edition in effect on the date of the defendant's criminal conduct. 13 We therefore ask whether the 2016 Guidelines edition generated a higher sentencing range for Urbina-Fuentes than the 2015 edition would have.

It did. Under the 2015 edition of the Guidelines, § 2L1.2 contemplated a possible sixteen-point increase to a defendant's offense level if he was previously convicted of a "crime of violence," 14 and an eight-point increase if he was previously convicted of an "aggravated felony." 15 In order to conclude that the 2015 Guidelines would not have generated a lower sentencing range than the 2016 Guidelines, the Parole Office and district court must have decided that one of these two enhancement provisions would have applied on the basis of Urbina-Fuentes's Florida burglary conviction.

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United States v. Carlos Urbina-Fuentes, 900 F.3d 687 (5th Cir. 2018).

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