United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit
No. 22-1541
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Appellee,
v.
CARLOS CRUZ-RIVERA,
Defendant, Appellant.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO
[Hon. Francisco A. Besosa, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Barron, Chief Judge, Thompson and Rikelman, Circuit Judges.
Johnny Rivera-González, for appellant.
Thomas F. Klumper, Assistant United States Attorney, Senior Appellate Counsel, with whom Mariana E. Bauzá-Almonte, Assistant United States Attorney, Chief, Appellate Division, and W. Stephen Muldrow, United States Attorney, were on brief, for appellee.
May 12, 2025 BARRON, Chief Judge. This appeal concerns Carlos
Cruz-Rivera's ("Cruz") motion to reduce his sentence. He brought
the motion in 2020 in the United States District Court for the
District of Puerto Rico pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A), as
amended by Section 603(b) of the First Step Act ("FSA"), Pub. L.
No. 115–391, § 603(b), 132 Stat. 5194, 5239 (2018). After the
District Court denied the motion, Cruz appealed. We vacated and
remanded for further consideration in light of our intervening
decision in United States v. Ruvalcaba, 26 F.4th 14 (1st Cir.
2022). On remand, the District Court ordered briefing on Ruvalcaba
before ultimately denying the motion in a brief text order that
did not specify the ground for the ruling. Cruz now appeals from
that judgment. We again vacate and remand.
I.
A.
The path to this appeal begins in September 2015, when
a grand jury in the District of Puerto Rico handed up a superseding
indictment. It charged Cruz with three carjacking counts, see 18
U.S.C. § 2119, one weapons-related count, see 18 U.S.C.
§ 922(g)(1); id. § 924(a)(2), and three counts of violating 18
U.S.C. § 924(c).
Cruz pleaded guilty to the charges in the three
carjacking counts but went to trial on the remaining charges. The
jury returned a guilty verdict on each of those charges.
- 2 - Under § 924(c), it is a crime to "use[] or carr[y] a
firearm" "during and in relation to any crime of violence." 18
U.S.C. § 924(c). A conviction for the specific kind of § 924(c)
violation for which Cruz was charged carried a seven-year mandatory
minimum prison sentence for first-time offenders, as it still does.
Id. § 924(c)(1)(A)(ii). In addition, at the time, § 924(c) imposed
a twenty-five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for any
"second or subsequent" conviction under its terms, id.
§ 924(c)(1)(C)(i) (amended 2018), which the Supreme Court had
interpreted to encompass even a § 924(c) conviction that the
defendant received in the same proceeding as he received his first
§ 924(c) conviction, see Deal v. United States, 508 U.S. 129,
135-36 (1993). Moreover, as is still the case, a sentence for a
§ 924(c) conviction had to be served consecutively to any other
sentence. 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(D)(ii).
Thus, although all three of Cruz's § 924(c) convictions
resulted from the same trial, two qualified as "second or
subsequent" convictions. Id. § 924(c)(1)(C)(i) (amended 2018).
Those convictions therefore each carried a twenty-five-year
mandatory minimum prison sentence, which had to be served
consecutively not only to one another but also to both the
mandatory seven-year prison sentence that Cruz's first § 924(c)
conviction carried and the sentences imposed for each of his
convictions on his other charges.
- 3 - As a result, on March 2, 2016, the District Court
sentenced Cruz to a total term of imprisonment of 872 months, or
nearly 73 years. Of that total, 684 months of imprisonment were
attributable to his § 924(c) sentences. Accordingly, Cruz, who
was 41 at the time, received the equivalent of a life sentence.
B.
We affirmed the District Court's judgment on appeal.
See United States v. Cruz-Rivera, 904 F.3d 63 (1st Cir. 2018).1
Soon thereafter, in December 2018, Congress enacted the First Step
Act, 132 Stat. 5194.
The FSA represented a "bipartisan effort to remedy past
overzealous use of mandatory-minimum sentences." United States v.
Henry, 983 F.3d 214, 218 (6th Cir. 2020). Two FSA provisions are
relevant to this appeal.
The first provision is § 603(b). Generally, a district
court "may not modify a term of imprisonment once it has been
imposed." 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c). But 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)
provides that a district court "may reduce a term of imprisonment"
when (1) "extraordinary and compelling reasons warrant such a
1 On June 10, 2019, after mandate had issued in his appeal, Cruz filed a motion with the District Court that requested resentencing in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Dean v. United States, 581 U.S. 62 (2017). The Court held there that, when fashioning an appropriate sentence for a § 924(c) predicate offense, a district court may take into account the length of the mandatory sentence for the § 924(c) conviction. Id. at 71. The District Court denied the motion.
- 4 - reduction," id. § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i); (2) the reduction is
"consistent with applicable [United States Sentencing Commission
("Sentencing Commission")] policy statements," id.
§ 3582(c)(1)(A); and (3) "consider[ing] any applicable [§] 3553(a)
factors," the district court determines that the reduction is
"warranted . . . under the particular circumstances of the case,"
United States v. Texeira-Nieves, 23 F.4th 48, 52 (1st Cir. 2022)
(quoting United States v. Saccoccia, 10 F.4th 1, 4 (1st Cir.
2021)).
Prior to the enactment of § 603(b) of the FSA, a motion
under § 3582(c)(1)(A) had to be made by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons
("BOP") on a defendant's behalf. See United States v. Brooker,
976 F.3d 228, 231 (2d Cir. 2020) (citing 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)
(2017)). Section 603(b) removed that limitation by providing, for
the first time, that a defendant may file a motion under
§ 3582(c)(1)(A) after exhausting administrative remedies with the
BOP.
On May 26, 2020, Cruz took advantage of this change by
filing the sentence-reduction motion before us here.2 In doing
Cruz also filed a petition pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2255 on 2
March 31, 2020, seeking to vacate his sentence on various grounds. The District Court denied the petition as untimely on September 27, 2023. On September 23, 2024, we denied Cruz's request for a certificate of appealability in that case. See Cruz-Rivera v. United States, No. 23-1984, 2024 WL 5010801 (1st Cir. Sept. 23, 2024).
- 5 - so, Cruz invoked the other provision of the FSA that is relevant
to his appeal -- § 403.
That provision of the FSA broke with the Supreme Court's
ruling in Deal, 508 U.S. at 135-36. It provided that a § 924(c)
conviction is subject to a twenty-five-year mandatory minimum
prison sentence only if the "violation . . . occurr[ed] after a
prior conviction under [§ 924(c)] . . . bec[a]me final." FSA
§ 403(a) (amending 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(C)).
The FSA did not make the application of this amendment
retroactive, however. By its own terms, it did not apply in the
case of individuals, like Cruz, whose mandatory sentences for
violating § 924(c) were imposed prior to the FSA's enactment.3 See
id. § 403(b). Nonetheless, in his sentence-reduction motion, Cruz
invoked § 403 to argue that the "previous practice of stacking
3 After our decision in Cruz's earlier appeal and soon after the FSA took effect, Cruz timely filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court of the United States. He argued that the FSA entitled him to resentencing because his case was "pending" on direct review when the FSA was enacted. Petition for Writ of Certiorari, No. 18-7974 (U.S. Feb. 11, 2019). The Supreme Court denied the petition, see Cruz-Rivera v. United States, 586 U.S. 1255 (2019), but several months later, it vacated the Sixth Circuit's judgment in a similar case -- which had likewise been pending on direct review when the FSA was enacted -- with instructions to "consider" the FSA, see Richardson v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 2713 (2019) (mem.). Cruz then moved for us to recall the mandate in his case and to remand for resentencing under the FSA. We denied the motion. We explained that Congress intended for the FSA's amendments to apply only to defendants who had not yet been sentenced at the time of its enactment, and not to defendants whose cases were pending on direct review. United States v. Cruz-Rivera, 954 F.3d 410, 413 (1st Cir. 2020).
- 6 - under § 924(c) resulted in excessively harsh sentences," and that
"extraordinary and compelling reasons" therefore existed to reduce
what he contended was the equivalent of a life sentence that had
been imposed in his case.
Specifically, Cruz requested in his motion that the
District Court reduce his prison sentence by 432 months (or 36
years) "to reflect how he would be sentenced under § 924(c) as
currently written." According to Cruz, "without changes to his
sentence on other counts, [his] second and third stacked 25-year
sentences would be replaced by two 7-year stacked sentences,"
amounting to an eighteen-year reduction on each count.
The government opposed Cruz's motion. It argued that,
as a matter of law, the District Court "lack[ed] authority to grant
[the] relief" requested. The government contended that Cruz, "in
effect, [was] seeking retroactive application of [§] 403 of the
[FSA]," even though Congress had "expressly declined to extend the
benefit of the amended [§] 924(c) to defendants like Cruz[]" who
were sentenced before the FSA's enactment.
The government also argued that, based on the Sentencing
Commission policy statement addressing sentence-reduction motions
under § 3582(c)(1)(A), the only "reasons" that could constitute
"compelling and extraordinary reasons" for a sentence reduction
were the defendant's medical condition, age, and family
circumstances. The government therefore contended that the policy
- 7 - statement did not "provide[] any basis for [relief] based on
reevaluation of the severity of the original sentence."
On October 21, 2020, the District Court denied Cruz's
motion in a brief text order, which stated that the denial was
"for the reasons indicated by the government." Cruz then timely
appealed.
While the appeal was pending, we decided United States
v. Ruvalcaba, 26 F.4th 14 (1st Cir. 2022). We held there that the
policy statement concerning sentence-reduction motions then in
effect applied only to motions that the BOP itself brought. Id.
at 20-21. In consequence, we held that district courts considering
defendant-initiated sentence-reduction motions were not bound in
their assessments of the motions by that policy statement. Id. at
23-24.
Thus, we explained that, at least until the Sentencing
Commission issued an updated policy statement applicable to
defendant-initiated motions for sentence reductions, district
courts were required to assess such motions for consistency with
the statutory "extraordinary and compelling standard," but not for
consistency with the standard set forth in the then-operative
policy statement.4 Id. at 23-24. We further held that, as part
4 We noted, however, that "[i]f and when the Sentencing Commission issues updated guidance applicable to prisoner-initiated motions for sentence reductions consistent with
- 8 - of those assessments, district courts may consider, "on a
case-by-case basis," whether a nonretroactive sentencing
amendment, "predicated on a defendant's particular
circumstances[,] comprise[s] an extraordinary and compelling
reason, and, thus, satisf[ies] the standard for compassionate
release." Id. at 28 (citing 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i)).
Based on our decision in Ruvalcaba, we vacated the
District Court's order denying Cruz's sentence-reduction motion
and remanded "for further consideration consistent with . . .
[that decision]." On remand, the District Court ordered the
parties to file memoranda addressing the impact of Ruvalcaba on
Cruz's motion and "whether the previous practice of 'stacking'
pursuant to [§] 924(c) meets the definition of extraordinary and
compelling reasons in [Cruz's] case."
both [§] 3582(c)(1)(A) and the Sentencing Commission's statutory mandate[,] . . . district courts addressing such motions not only will be bound by the statutory criteria but also will be required to ensure that their determinations of extraordinary and compelling reasons are consistent with that guidance." Ruvalcaba, 26 F.4th at 23-24 (1st Cir. 2022). On November 1, 2023, an updated policy statement went into effect, revising the Sentencing Commission's guidance to encompass defendant-initiated sentence-reduction motions. See U.S.S.G. amend. 814 (Nov. 1, 2023) (amending U.S.S.G. § 1B1.13). Although Cruz discusses the amended policy statement in a supplemental brief, neither party has contended to us that the updated policy statement, which went into effect after Cruz filed his motion for a sentence reduction, applies in his case. Thus, we assume that, as in Ruvalcaba, the District Court in this case was obligated to assess his motion "primarily through the lens of the statutory criteria." 26 F.4th at 24.
- 9 - After considering those submissions, the District Court
denied Cruz's motion on June 24, 2022, once again in a brief text
order. The order stated that the District Court was denying the
motion "[h]aving reviewed the court of appeals' judgment in this
case, its opinion in [Ruvalcaba], and the parties' well-thought
out and thorough filings." Cruz thereafter timely filed this
appeal.
II.
We review a district court's denial of a
sentence-reduction motion under § 3582(c)(1)(A) for abuse of
discretion. Saccoccia, 10 F.4th at 4-5. In doing so, we review
questions of law de novo and findings of fact for clear error.
Ruvalcaba, 26 F.4th at 19.
Cruz contends that, under Ruvalcaba, the nonretroactive
changes to § 924(c)'s sentencing regime give rise, in his specific
case, to an "extraordinary and compelling" reason for reducing his
sentence. He goes on to contend that the District Court erred as
a matter of law in denying his motion for a sentence reduction
because the District Court did so based on a "misunderstanding
[about] the scope of its discretion" to grant him the relief
requested "based on a prospectively applicable change in the law."
In support of this argument, Cruz asserts that the
District Court failed to provide "any reasonable and prudent
explanation" for its ruling. He also emphasizes that the District
- 10 - Court never indicated that, "after weighing the 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)
factors, it would deny a sentence reduction regardless of the scope
of its second-look authority." See United States v. Canales-
Ramos, 19 F.4th 561, 569 n.4 (1st Cir. 2021) ("[A] district court's
supportable determination that the [§] 3553(a) factors weigh
against the granting of compassionate release constitutes an
independently sufficient basis to uphold a denial of such
relief.").
The government responds, in part, by asserting that Cruz
has failed on appeal to contest "the [D]istrict [C]ourt's
determinations that he failed to provide an extraordinary and
compelling reason to reduce his sentence, or alternatively, [that]
the § 3553(a) factors did not weigh in favor of a sentence
reduction." It argues that Cruz therefore has waived "any argument
on either ground."
Based on the arguments that Cruz has set forth in his
briefing to us, we are not persuaded by the government's contention
regarding waiver. We thus train our focus on the government's
alternative contention for affirming the ruling below, which is
that Cruz's challenge on appeal is without merit.
The government acknowledges that the District Court's
text order denying Cruz's motion does not expressly state the
specific statutory ground for the denial. Even so, the government
- 11 - argues that we must affirm the District Court because, looking to
the "entire context and record," Texeira-Nieves, 23 F.4th at 56,
we must "infer that the [D]istrict [C]ourt followed the
government's reasons for denying [Cruz's] motion," see United
States v. Jiménez-Beltre, 440 F.3d 514, 519 (1st Cir. 2006) ("[A]
court's reasoning can often be inferred by comparing what was
argued by the parties . . . with what the judge did."). As a
result, the government argues, we must conclude that the District
Court "relied upon two [permissible] grounds" in denying Cruz's
motion: that Cruz "failed to provide an extraordinary and
compelling reason to reduce his sentence," and, alternatively,
that "the § 3553(a) factors . . . did not weigh in favor of a
sentence reduction." We cannot agree.
1.
It is true that a determination by the District Court
"that the balance of the [§] 3553(a) factors weighs against a
sentence reduction [could] constitute[] an independent reason" to
affirm the judgment denying Cruz's motion. Texeira-Nieves, 23
F.4th at 54; see also Canales-Ramos, 19 F.4th at 569 n.4. But it
is not clear from the District Court's brief text order that any
such determination was made here.
The government acknowledges that only one of the
arguments that it made to the District Court for denying Cruz's
motion concerned the § 3553(a) factors. The other concerned Cruz
- 12 - having failed to satisfy the "extraordinary and compelling
reasons" requirement, which, if supported on this record, itself
would provide a sufficient basis for denying Cruz's motion. Thus,
because the District Court's order denying the motion merely
references the "parties' . . . filings" without identifying any
specific ground for the denial, let alone referencing § 3553(a) or
its factors, we agree with Cruz that we cannot rule out the
possibility that the District Court relied solely on the
"extraordinary and compelling reasons" ground that the government
advanced in denying Cruz's motion. We therefore cannot affirm the
District Court's denial of the motion based on its evaluation of
the § 3553(a) factors, as we have no basis for concluding that the
District Court undertook any such evaluation.
2.
There remains to address, of course, the other ground
that the government advanced below for denying Cruz's motion, which
concerns the statutory "extraordinary and compelling reasons"
requirement. But Cruz contends that we cannot rely on this ground
to affirm the ruling below because the District Court erred as a
matter of law insofar as it denied his motion based on its
determination that he failed to satisfy this requirement. We now
turn to that aspect of Cruz's challenge on appeal.
As noted above, we made clear in Ruvalcaba that, in
assessing whether a sentence-reduction motion that invokes a
- 13 - nonretroactive sentencing amendment meets the statutory
"extraordinary and compelling reasons" standard, a district court
may consider the sentencing amendment in question so long as it
does so "on an individualized basis, grounded in [that] defendant's
particular circumstances." Id. at 16. In addition, we identified
in Ruvalcaba the defendant's "relatively young age at the time he
began serving his life term and the gross disparity between his
pre-FSA mandatory sentence and his putative post-FSA mandatory
minimum" as a potential ground for concluding that the
nonretroactive sentencing amendment in question "manifest[ed]" in
his individual case in a way that gave rise to an "extraordinary
and compelling reason[]" for relief. Id. at 24; see also United
States v. McCoy, 981 F.3d 271, 285-86 (4th Cir. 2020) (explaining
that "the severity of a § 924(c) sentence, combined with the
enormous disparity between that sentence and the sentence a
defendant would receive today, can constitute an 'extraordinary
and compelling' reason for relief").
The government correctly argued to the District Court
that, under Ruvalcaba, "the mere fact of a 'pre-First Step Act
mandatory [sentence] . . . cannot, standing alone, serve as the
basis for a sentence reduction.'" 26 F.4th at 28 (quoting United
States v. McGee, 992 F.3d 1035, 1048 (10th Cir. 2021)). And we do
not doubt that the government is right that, in ruling as it did
on Cruz's motion, the District Court "understood that, after
- 14 - Ruvalcaba, it could consider non-retroactive FSA sentencing
changes, including the § 924(c)[] stacking provision change" as
"part of the extraordinary and compelling calculus."
We are not similarly confident, however, that the
District Court understood that, under Ruvalcaba, factors such as
the size of the claimed sentencing disparity and the defendant's
age at sentencing can, in combination, make the passage of a
nonretroactive sentencing amendment an "extraordinary and
compelling reason" to reduce that particular defendant's sentence.
In that regard, we note that in making the case that Cruz had not
satisfied the "extraordinary and compelling reasons" requirement,
the government argued to the District Court that a nonretroactive
sentencing amendment must be paired with "other factors" to "form
the basis for a successful motion under [§] 3582(c)(1)(A)"
(emphasis added). And, notably, in pressing that contention, the
government does not appear to have treated such "other factors" as
encompassing the kind of individualized considerations Cruz is
relying on here -- namely, the size of the disparity in his
mandatory sentence relative to what that sentence would have been
under the nonretroactive amendment to § 924(c)'s stacking regime
and his age at the time that he received his mandatory sentence.
Indeed, in the proceedings on Cruz's sentence-reduction
motion before the District Court, the government never addressed
Cruz's contention that there were "extraordinary and compelling
- 15 - reasons" for granting his motion due to the 36-year disparity
between the sentence that he received under § 924(c) and the
sentence he would have received under its amended provision. Nor
did the government address Cruz's contention that the disparity
resulted in a sentence confining him to prison for the remainder
of his life. Instead, the government simply argued that Cruz had
"failed to demonstrate an 'extraordinary and compelling' reason to
modify his sentence" and then cited to some of the facts
surrounding his commission of the offenses underlying his
convictions.
We are therefore concerned that the government's
arguments to the District Court about the "compelling and
extraordinary reasons" requirement were susceptible to being
understood as arguments for treating that requirement as stricter
than Ruvalcaba held that it is. More specifically, our concern is
that the government's arguments suggested that, contrary to
Ruvalcaba, Cruz could not, as a matter of law, satisfy the
"extraordinary and compelling reasons" requirement based only on
the factors that he identified because those factors all pertained
to the effect that the FSA's amendment to § 924(c) would have had
on the length of his sentence had that amendment been retroactive.
This concern about what the government may have been
understood to have argued is reinforced by the fact that, on
appeal, the government faults Cruz for "present[ing] no other
- 16 - factor" -- apart from his stacked § 924(c) sentences -- "supporting
a sentence reduction." The government faults Cruz in this regard
even though he has consistently argued that the size of the
sentencing disparity for his § 924(c) sentences and the fact of
his resulting life-equivalent prison term qualify as a "compelling
and extraordinary" reason to grant a sentence reduction in his
specific case. Thus, given the District Court's sparse text order
denying Cruz's motion, we cannot rule out the possibility that the
District Court relied on an impermissibly narrow view of what,
under Ruvalcaba, may constitute "extraordinary and compelling
reasons" for relief.
That said, we emphasize that we express no view as to
whether the specific reason that Cruz asserts for reducing his
sentence satisfies the "extraordinary and compelling reasons"
requirement in his case. Nor do we attempt to resolve whether,
insofar as that reason does satisfy the statutory standard, a
reduction in his sentence would be warranted after accounting for
the § 3553(a) factors. Instead, we conclude only that, due to the
nature of the arguments that the government advanced below and the
sparse text order that the District Court issued in denying Cruz's
motion, it is "impossible to determine, based on this record,
whether . . . [the error Cruz alleges] occurred." United States
v. Mendez, 802 F.3d 93, 98 (1st Cir. 2015). Accordingly, we
- 17 - conclude that "appellate review is unworkable" and "a remand is
necessary," id., to ensure that, insofar as the District Court in
resolving Cruz's motion addresses the "extraordinary and
compelling reasons" requirement, it applies a proper understanding
of that requirement under Ruvalcaba rather than the unduly narrow
understanding that the government may be understood to have
advanced below, see also United States v. Gilman, 478 F.3d 440,
446-47 (1st Cir. 2007) ("[I]f we are in fact unable to discern
from the record the reasoning behind the district court's
[conclusion], appellate review is frustrated and 'it is incumbent
upon us to vacate . . . .'" (quoting United States v. Feliz, 453
F.3d 33, 36 (1st Cir. 2006))).
C.
There is one last point to address. Cruz contends in a
supplemental brief on appeal that the District Court's denial of
his separate § 2255 petition, which included a short discussion of
the sentence-reduction motion at issue here, indicates that the
District Court "show[ed] partiality and [an] intent to hold its
position even though this Court . . . ordered [it] to consider
[Ruvalcaba] before making a final determination in this case." On
that basis, Cruz requests that, if we vacate and remand the ruling
denying his motion to reduce his sentence, we assign the case on
remand to a different district court judge. We see no basis,
- 18 - however, for concluding that there was any partiality in the habeas
proceedings. We therefore deny this request.
III.
The judgment of the District Court is vacated and the
matter is remanded for further consideration consistent with this
opinion.
- 19 -