Rosales-Mireles: Writ of Certiorari Appeal

In a writ of certiorari to the 5th Circuit, Rosales-Mireles challenged his guideline range of punishment. 

A miscalculation of a Guidelines sentencing range that has been determined to be plain and to affect a defendant’s substantial rights calls for a court of appeals to exercise its discretion under Rule 52(b)to vacate the defendant’s sentence in the ordinary case. Pp. 6–15. This is a writ of certiorari

History

Each year, district courts sentence thousands of individuals to imprisonment for violations of federal law. To help ensure certainty and fairness in those sentences, federal district courts are required to consider the advisory United States Sentencing Guidelines. Prior to sentencing, the United States Probation Office prepares a pre-sentence investigation report to help the court determine the applicable Guidelines range.

Ultimately, the district court is responsible for ensuring the Guidelines range it considers is correct. At times, however, an error in the calculation of the Guidelines range goes unnoticed by the court and the parties. On appeal, such errors not raised in the district court may be remedied under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 52(b), provided that, as established in United States v. Olano, 507 U. S. 725: (1) the error was not “intentionally relinquished or abandoned,” (2) the error is plain, and (3) the error “affected the defendant’s substantial rights,” Molina-Martinez v. United States, 578

No. 16–9493. Argued February 21, 2018—Decided June 18, 2018

1. S. ___, ___. If those conditions are met, “the court of appeals should exercise its discretion to correct the forfeited error if the error ‘ “seriously affects the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings.” ’ ” Id., at ___. This last consideration is often called Olano’s fourth prong. The issue here is when a Guidelines error that satisfies Olano’s first three conditions warrants relief under the fourth prong.

Guideline Range and Sentencing

Petitioner Florencio Rosales-Mireles pleaded guilty to illegal reentry into the United States. In calculating the guidelines range, the presentence report by the probation office, mistakenly counted a state misdemeanor conviction twice. As a result, the report yielded a guidelines range of 77 to 96 months. The correctly calculated range would have been 70 to 87 months. Rosales-Mireles did not object to the error in the district court, which relied on the miscalculated guidelines range and sentenced him to 78 months of imprisonment.

On appeal, Rosales-Mireles challenged the incorrect Guidelines range for the first time. The Fifth Circuit found that the Guidelines error was plain and that it affected Rosales-Mireles’ substantial rights.  There was a “reasonable probability that he would have been subject to a different sentence but for the error.”

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit declined to remand the case for resentencing. Therefore, concluding that Rosales-Mireles had not established that the error would seriously affect the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceeding. Because neither the error nor the resulting sentence “would shock the conscience.”

Wording from the Court

(a) Although “Rule 52(b) is permissive, not mandatory,” Olano, 507

736. S., at 735, it is well established that courts “should” correct a forfeited plain error affecting substantial rights “if the error ‘seriously affect[s] the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings,’ ” id., at 736. Like the narrow rule rejected in Olano, which would have called for relief only for a miscarriage of justice, the Fifth Circuit’s shock-the-conscience standard too narrowly confines the extent of the court of appeals’ discretion. It is not reflected in Rule 52(b), nor in how the plain-error doctrine has been applied by this Court, which has reversed judgments for plain error based on inadvertent or unintentional errors by the court or the parties below and has remanded cases involving such errors, including sentencing errors, for consideration of Olano’s fourth prong. The errors are not required to amount to a “powerful indictment” of the system. The Fifth Circuit’s emphasis on the district judge’s “competence or integrity” also unnecessarily narrows Olano’s instruction to correct an error if it seriously affects “judicial proceedings.” Pp. 6–8.

(b) The effect of the Fifth Circuit’s heightened standard is especially pronounced in cases like this one. An error resulting in a higher range than the Guidelines provide usually establishes a reasonable probability that a defendant will serve a prison sentence greater than “necessary” to fulfill the purposes of incarceration, 18 U. S. C. §3553(a). See Molina-Martinez, 578 U. S., at ___. That risk of unnecessary deprivation of liberty particularly undermines the fairness,integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings in the context of a plain Guidelines error because Guidelines miscalculations ultimately result from judicial error, as the district court is charged in the first instance with ensuring the Guidelines range it considers is correct. Moreover, remands for resentencing are relatively inexpensive proceedings compared to remands for retrial. Ensuring the accuracy of Guidelines determinations also furthers the Sentencing Commission’s goal of achieving uniformity and proportionality in sentencing more broadly, since including uncorrected sentences based on incorrect Guidelines ranges in the data the Commission collects could undermine the Commission’s ability to make appropriate revisions to the Guidelines. Because any exercise of discretion at the fourth prong of Olano inherently requires “a case-specific and fact-intensive” inquiry, Puckett v. United States, 556 U. S. 129, 142, countervailing factors may satisfy the court of appeals that the fairness, integrity,and public reputation of the proceedings will be preserved absent correction. But there are no such factors in this case. Pp. 8–11.

(c) The Government and dissent maintain that even though the Fifth Circuit’s standard was inaccurate, Rosales-Mireles is still not entitled to relief. But their arguments are unpersuasive. They caution that granting this type of relief would be inconsistent with the Court’s statements that discretion under Rule 52(b) should be exercised “sparingly,” Jones v. United States, 527 U. S. 373, 389, and reserved for “exceptional circumstances,” Meyer v. Kenmore Granville Hotel Co., 297 U. S. 160. In contrast to the Jones remand, however, no additional jury proceedings would be required in a remand for re-sentencing based on a Guidelines miscalculation. Plus, the circumstances of Rosales-Mireles’ case are exceptional under this Court’s precedent, as they are reasonably likely to have resulted in a longer prison sentence than necessary and there are no countervailing factors that otherwise further the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings.

Government Considers Guideline Range

The government and dissent also assert that Rosales-Mireles’ sentence is presumptively reasonable because it falls within the corrected Guidelines range. But a court of appeals can consider a sentence’s substantive reasonableness only after it ensures “that the district court committed no significant procedural error, such as failing to calculate (or improperly calculating) the Guidelines range.”

Gall v. United States, 552 U. S. 38, 51. If a district court cannot properly determine whether, considering all sentencing factors, including the correct Guidelines range, a sentence is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary,” 18 U. S. C. §3553(a). The resulting sentence would not bear the reliability that would support a“presumption of reasonableness” on review. See 552 U. S., at 51. And regardless of its ultimate reasonableness, a sentence that lacks reliability because of unjust procedures may well undermine public perception of the proceedings.

Finally, the Government and dissent maintain that the Court’s decision will create an opportunity for “sandbagging” that Rule 52(b) is supposed to prevent. But that concern fails to account for the realities at play in sentencing proceedings, where it is highly speculative that a defendant would benefit from a strategy of deliberately forgoing an objection in the district court, with hopes of arguing for reversal under plain-error review later. Pp. 12–14.

SOTOMAYOR, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS,

1. J., and KENNEDY, GINSBURG, BREYER, KAGAN, and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which ALITO, J., joined

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