Case ID: f-appx_633/html/0564-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Frank ROGERS, Defendant-Appellant.
    No. 14-4480-cr.
    United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
    Feb. 22, 2016.
    Marshall Aron Mintz, Mintz & Oppen-heim LLP, New York, NY, for Appellant.
    Carla B. Freedman and Steven D. Clymer, Assistant United States Attorneys, for Richard S. Hartunian, United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, Syracuse, NY, for Appellee.
    Present: AMALYA L. KEARSE, ROSEMARY S. POOLER, and ROBERT D. SACK, Circuit Judges.
   SUMMARY ORDER

Frank Rogers appeals from the December 1, 2014 judgment of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York (Suddaby, C.J.). The district court sentenced Rogers principally to 220 months’ imprisonment. On appeal, Rogers argues that the district court erred in sentencing him as a career offender. We assume the parties’ familiarity with the underlying facts, procedural history, and specification of issues for review.

We conclude, on the basis of the record in this case, that Rogers has waived his present contention that the district court’s sentencing him as a career offender was error. Waiver is the “intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right.” United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 733, 113 S.Ct. 1770, 123 L.Ed.2d 508 (1993) (quoting Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464, 58 S.Ct. 1019, 82 L.Ed. 1461 (1938)). “Deviation from a legal rule is ‘error’ unless the rule has been waived.” Id. at 732-33, 113 S.Ct. 1770 (emphasis added). If “a particular right is waivable,” and if the defendant “knowingly and voluntarily” makes the choice to forgo that right, the right is “extinguish[ed],” and the court’s decision made in accordance with that choice “is not error.” Id. at 733, 113 S.Ct. 1770 (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added). Where a defendant “has waived — that is, intentionally relinquished or abandoned, id. at 733, 113 S.Ct. 1770, [his] right to” dispute the ruling challenged on appeal, “there [was] no error at all and plain-error analysis would add nothing.” Puckett v. United States, 556 U.S. 129, 138, 129 S.Ct. 1423, 173 L.Ed.2d 266 (2009) (first emphasis in original; second emphasis added).

In the present case, Rogers not only did not object to his classification as a career offender, he expressly conceded that classification. At sentencing, his attorney, while urging the district court to impose a lenient sentence on the ground that Rogers was not yet 18 years old at the time of his two prior qualifying convictions, said “[technically the Presentence Report is correct, he is a career offender.” App’x at 81. Accordingly, Rogers waived his right to dispute his classification as a career offender. We have considered Rogers’s other arguments and find them to be without merit. The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.