In U.S. v. Shelton, No. 04-12602 (Feb. 25, 2005), the Court (Carnes, Hull, Marcus) concluded that no Sixth Amendmetn Booker violations occurred during sentencing, but remanded for resentencing because the district court erred in sentencing under a mandatory Guidelines regime, and the defendant established a reasonable probability that the district court would have imposed a lesser sentence but for the mandatory Guidelines regime.
The Court noted that after the defendant pled guilty to crack cocaine trafficking and § 924(c) charges, the sentencing court "expressed its disapproval of the [190-month] sentence." The sentencing court commented that Shelton’s sentence was "very, very severe." The sentencing court noted that "unfortunately" the Guidelines criminal-history calculation took into account each of the defendant’s past charges and do not take into account the fact that the sentences imposed on these charges were short as a result of such factors as the youth of the defendant or the amount of drugs involved. The district court later noted that Congress had taken "a very, very hard stance when it comes to guns and drugs," and most significantly indicated that the most lenient sentence it could impose, a sentence at the low end of the Guidelines range, was "more than [was] appropriate in this situation."
Reviewing the issues for plain error (Shelton raised Booker issue for the first time in his initial brief), the Court found no error in the district court’s reliance on prior convictions to increase the defendant’s sentence, noting that Almendarez-Torres remains good law.
The Court also found no error in the sentencing court’s reliance on drug quantities no alleged in the indictment, pointing out that the defendant admitted to these drug quantities at his plea colloquy, and citing U.S. v. Frye, 2005 WL 315563 (11th Cir. Feb. 10, 2005).
Emphasizing that the defendant timely raised his Booker issues in his initial brief on direct appeal, the Court found error in the reliance on mandatory Guidelines: "Although the district court followed the correct sentencing procedure when it sentenced Shelton, the Supreme Court has now excised the mandatory nature of the Guidelines in Booker." The error is now "plain" in light of Booker. Finally, the error affected the defendant’s substantial rights, because the sentencing court "expressed its view several times that the sentence required by the Guidelines was too severe, and noted that "unfortunately" the criminal history computation overstated the defendant’s criminal background. Further, the court sentenced the defendant to the bottom of the Guidelines range. Thus, the defendant established a "reasonable probability" of a lesser sentence under a non-mandatory system.
The Court concluded that the fourth prong of plain error was also met, because the error seriously affected the fairness integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings. The Court distinguished U.S. v. Curtis, 380 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 2004), which had held that the fourth prong of plain error was not satisfied by a Blakely error, noting that this portion of Curtis was an "alternative ruling," that Curtis had found no "substantial rights" impact (unlike Shelton), and that the Curtis panel had assumed that the error merely involved a Sixth Amendment violation, not the use of a mandatory system, as Booker provided.
