United States v. Joseph Hubman

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
• Decided: April 10, 2024
• Docket: 22-4694
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

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UNPUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 22-4694

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

JOSEPH CURTIS HUBMAN,

Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, at Huntington. Robert C. Chambers, District Judge. (3:22-cr-00024-1)

Submitted: March 6, 2024 Decided: April 10, 2024

Before WYNN and HARRIS, Circuit Judges, and KEENAN, Senior Circuit Judge.

Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.

ON BRIEF: Wesley P. Page, Federal Public Defender, Rhett H. Johnson, Assistant Federal Public Defender, Jonathan D. Byrne, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellant. William S. Thompson, United States Attorney, Lesley S. Shamblin, Assistant United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellee.

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PER CURIAM:

Joseph Curtis Hubman pled guilty to possession of child pornography involving

prepubescent minors, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(5)(B), (b)(2). The district court

calculated Hubman’s advisory imprisonment range under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines

Manual (2018) at 78 to 97 months and, after imposing an upward variance, sentenced

Hubman to 120 months’ imprisonment. Hubman challenges the substantive

reasonableness of this sentence on appeal. We affirm.

“We review the reasonableness of a [criminal] sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)

using an abuse-of-discretion standard, regardless of whether the sentence is inside, just

outside, or significantly outside the Guidelines range.” United States v. Nance, 957 F.3d

204, 212 (4th Cir. 2020) (cleaned up). “[A] sentence outside the Guidelines carries no

presumption of unreasonableness.” Irizarry v. United States, 553 U.S. 708, 714 (2008).

In reviewing the substantive reasonableness of a sentence, * “we examine the totality

of the circumstances to see whether the sentencing court abused its discretion in concluding

that the sentence it chose satisfied the standards set forth in § 3553(a).” United States v.

Abed, 3 F.4th 104, 119 (4th Cir. 2021) (cleaned up). “Where, as here, the sentence is

outside the advisory Guidelines range, we must consider whether the sentencing court acted

reasonably both with respect to its decision to impose such a sentence and with respect to

the extent of the divergence from the sentencing range.” Nance, 957 F.3d at 215 (internal

* We have confirmed after review of the record that the sentence is procedurally reasonable. See United States v. Provance, 944 F.3d 213, 215, 218 (4th Cir. 2019).

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quotation marks omitted). “[E]ven though we might reasonably conclude that a different

sentence is appropriate, that conclusion, standing alone, is an insufficient basis to vacate

the district court’s chosen sentence.” United States v. Zuk, 874 F.3d 398, 409 (4th Cir.

2017) (cleaned up). Rather, “we must give due deference to the district court’s decision

that the § 3553(a) factors, on a whole, justify the extent of the variance.” Abed, 3 F.4th at

119 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Hubman argues that his prison term is substantively unreasonable because the

district court placed undue weight on the vast size of the collection of child pornography

he possessed and the fact that he made and possessed a video of his son and overlooked

other relevant factors like his criminal history score of zero and his age. Although the

district court sentenced Hubman to a prison term 23 months above the top end of the

Guidelines range, we conclude that the imposition of this term was not an abuse of

discretion under the totality of the circumstances. The record reflects that the district court

considered Hubman’s request for a below-Guidelines prison term and weighed it against

the serious nature of his offense conduct in possessing an extensive collection of child

pornography across multiple devices, his fixation on his pornography, and the needs for

the sentence imposed to reflect the serious nature of his conduct and to afford adequate

deterrence, see 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(1), (2)(A)-(B). Although “reasonable jurists could

perhaps have balanced those competing factors differently and arrived at a different result,

we cannot conclude that this is one of the rare cases where the sentence imposed by the

district court was substantively unreasonable in light of the § 3553(a) factors.” Abed, 3

F.4th at 119 (cleaned up).

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We thus affirm the criminal judgment. We dispense with oral argument because the

facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before this court and

argument would not aid the decisional process.

AFFIRMED