United States v. Clark

Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit·Decided August 1, 2025·No. 24-1215·Unpublished

Opinion

FILED

United States Court of Appeals UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Tenth Circuit

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT August 1, 2025

Christopher M. Wolpert

Clerk of Court

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v. No. 24-1215 (D.C. No. 1:23-CR-00502-DDD-1)

JAMES ROBERT CLARK, (D. Colo.)

Defendant - Appellant.

ORDER AND JUDGMENT*

Before MATHESON, BACHARACH, and McHUGH, Circuit Judges.

In this appeal, Defendant-Appellant James Robert Clark challenges the procedural reasonableness of the district court’s imposition of a special condition of supervised release—a requirement to participate in a sex-offense-specific “evaluation and/or treatment program”—as part of his sentence following a guilty plea for attempted bank robbery. ROA Vol. I at 65. Mr. Clark argues the district court ran afoul of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32(i)(3)(B)’s command that a sentencing

*

After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel has determined unanimously that oral argument would not materially assist in the determination of this appeal. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2); 10th Cir. R. 34.1(G). The case is therefore ordered submitted without oral argument. This order and judgment is not binding precedent, except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It may be cited, however, for its persuasive value consistent with Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 and Tenth Circuit Rule 32.1.

court faced with “any disputed portion of the presentence report” either “rule on the dispute or determine that a ruling is unnecessary either because the matter will not affect sentencing, or because the court will not consider the matter in sentencing.” Specifically, he asserts the district court violated this rule when it (1) declined to resolve his objection to the veracity of an arrest warrant application and supporting affidavit (the “Warrant Affidavit,” or the “hands-on allegations”) from a prior sex offense that was quoted in his presentence investigation report (“PSR”), and (2) relied on those contents to impose the sex-offense-specific special condition of supervised release.

Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we agree with Mr. Clark that the district court committed legal error by neither requiring the Government to prove the veracity of the disputed Warrant Affidavit nor ignoring that information altogether as required by Rule 32(i)(3)(B). And because the Government has not shown this procedural error was harmless by a preponderance of the evidence, we vacate Mr. Clark’s sentence and remand for resentencing.

I. BACKGROUND

A. The offense1

On December 13, 2023, Mr. Clark entered a bank in Commerce City, Colorado, and handed a bank teller a note that read “ALL THE MONE [sic] IN BOTH DRAWERS, NO DIE PACKS, NO TRACERS!! DON’T PUSH THE

1 All facts regarding the offense conduct are drawn from Mr. Clark’s guilty plea and statement of facts.

ALARM.” ROA Vol. I at 22. The “teller attempted to access the money contained in the drawers but was unsuccessful in doing so. Eventually, Mr. Clark retrieved the note and left the bank without any money or thing of value.” Id.

Less than a week later, on December 19, 2023, Mr. Clark was indicted on one count for a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2113(a) for attempting to take, by force and violence or by intimidation, money in the possession of an FDIC-insured bank. Two months later, on February 21, 2024, Mr. Clark pleaded guilty to that count, and the district court accepted the plea.

B. The PSR and objections thereto In April 2024, the probation office filed Mr. Clark’s PSR, which detailed Mr. Clark’s lengthy criminal history—five juvenile convictions and twelve adult convictions—including a bank robbery conviction in 2012. Additionally, the PSR noted another bank robbery incident in 2019 in which prosecutors dropped a robbery count in exchange for Mr. Clark’s guilty plea to aggravated assault based on Mr. Clark having grabbed a police officer’s gun after the robbery.

Relevant here, the PSR also detailed Mr. Clark’s 2008 conviction on a guilty plea to attempted sexual assault of a child. Instead of excerpting the facts Mr. Clark admitted in connection with the guilty plea, the PSR quoted a portion of the Warrant Affidavit, which described in depth the unproved allegations of sexual assaults of a ten-year-old boy in 2003.

The PSR further summarized the contents of a discharge summary and psychosexual evaluation rendered by a treatment provider who treated Mr. Clark

pursuant to a special condition imposed as part of Mr. Clark’s sentence for a 2023 supervised release violation. That condition, like the condition at issue here, required Mr. Clark to complete a sex-offense-specific evaluation and/or treatment. Based on the provider’s conclusion that Mr. Clark’s risk of “sexual reoffending is high,” ROA Vol. II at 29, and “the nature of the defendant’s prior sexual offense,” the probation office recommended that the court impose a sex-offense-specific special condition of supervised release—namely, that Mr. Clark undergo “a sex offender evaluation and treatment,” id. at 39.

Mr. Clark timely filed written objections to the PSR. Relevant to this appeal, Mr. Clark objected to “the inclusion of a verbatim account of the Affidavit and Application for Arrest Warrant,” asserting “the allegations are inaccurate and untrue.” ROA Vol. I at 36. Mr. Clark stressed that “[h]e did not admit to those allegations in 2008, and he does not admit to them in 2024.” Id.

Mr. Clark further objected to the PSR’s recommendation that the court impose a sex-offense-specific special condition of supervised release, claiming the “condition is not reasonably related to the factors set forth in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) and involves a greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary to achieve the purposes of deterring criminal activity, protecting the public, and promoting Mr. Clark’s rehabilitation.” Id. at 37; see 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d). In essence, Mr. Clark noted that his sole “sex offense occurred 21 years ago and has not been repeated

since,” and argued the special condition could not be supported by such a temporally remote, isolated conviction.2 Id. at 37–39.

The probation office stood by its recommendation of the sex-offense-specific condition in its addendum to the PSR, responding in part to Mr. Clark’s objection to the condition by appending the full psychosexual evaluation and discharge summary (the “treatment materials”) that were referenced in the PSR. Like the PSR, the treatment materials excerpted the contents of the Warrant Affidavit under headings variously titled “Reason for Referral” or “Summary of Referring Sexual Behaviors.” ROA Vol. II at 81–82, 100–01. But those sections of the treatment materials went beyond the disputed excerpt of the Warrant Affidavit, including additional allegations by the victim’s mother that Mr. Clark also sexually assaulted her daughter, the victim’s sister. Those materials further reflect that the provider wrongly believed that “the referring sexual offense” was Mr. Clark’s “guilty plea to sexually assaulting two minor-aged children, male and female siblings.” Id. at 97.3 The provider expressly incorporated this factual misapprehension into her risk assessment, explaining that one contributor to “Mr. Clark’s risk for further

2 Mr. Clark presses this argument on appeal in the alternative to his procedural reasonableness challenge. Because we agree that Mr. Clark has shown reversible error under his procedural reasonableness argument, we do not analyze his alternative, statutory challenge. As a result, we deny as moot Mr. Clark’s motion that we take judicial notice of a state court order that is relevant only to this challenge. ECF No. 31.

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