Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03216/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03216-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 510
Nature of Suit: Prisoner Petitions - Vacate Sentence
Cause of Action: 

---

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-3216

DAVID CONRAD,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Respondent-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 14 C 4343 — Amy J. St. Eve, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED DECEMBER 15, 2015— DECIDED MARCH 4, 2016

____________________

Before BAUER, POSNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. This appeal is from the denial of 

the defendant’s motion to vacate his sentence under 28 

U.S.C. § 2255 on the ground that Peugh v. United States, 133 

S. Ct. 2072 (2013), forbids subjecting a criminal defendant to 

an increase in his guidelines sentencing range made by the 

Sentencing Commission after the defendant had committed 

the crime for which he is being sentenced. When the defendant in the present case was sentenced, the guidelines range 

Case: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
2 No. 14-3216

applicable to his multiple violations of the federal laws relating to child pornography was 360 months to life; the judge 

sentenced him to 198 months, and we affirmed the conviction and sentence in United States v. Conrad, 673 F.3d 728 (7th 

Cir. 2012). Yet under the version of the guidelines in force 

years earlier, when the defendant had committed the crimes 

for which he was convicted, the guidelines range had been 

only 121 to 151 months.

Peugh was decided five months after the defendant’s 

conviction and sentence became final, and consistently with

28 U.S.C. § 2255(f)(3) he filed his section 2255 petition exactly 

one year after the decision in Peugh, which he cites for the 

proposition that a sentence influenced by a guidelines range 

promulgated after a defendant committed the offense of 

which he’s been convicted violates the ex post facto clause—

Art. I, § 9, cl. 3 of the U.S. Constitution for federal prosecutions, Art. I, § 10, cl. 1 for state prosecutions. So Peugh held. 

The question presented by this case is whether Peugh applies 

retroactively, and thus to the sentence meted out to the defendant in our case on the basis of the guidelines range in 

force when the district judge sentenced him—a range having

a higher ceiling than the range in force when he committed 

the crime.

The Supreme Court hasn’t said whether Peugh applies 

retroactively. Peugh itself is equivocal, stating on the one 

hand that errors in calculating a guidelines range are “procedural” but on the other hand that the ex post facto clauses 

forbid government “to enhance the measure of punishment 

by altering the substantive ‘formula’ used to calculate the 

applicable sentencing range.” 133 S. Ct. at 2080, 2083, 2088. 

The formula referred to is the guidelines, which create a senCase: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
No. 14-3216 3

tencing range that though not mandatory is highly influential. Elsewhere in the opinion we read that the guidelines are 

“the lodestone of sentencing,” that “sentencing decisions are 

anchored by the Guidelines,” and that as a practical matter, 

though not required by law, “when a Guidelines range 

moves up or down, offenders’ sentences move with it.” Id. at 

2083, 2084.

The significance of the reference in Peugh to “procedural” 

errors is that in the Court’s view a practice declared after the 

sentence in a case becomes final to be a procedural error, in 

contrast to one declared to be a substantive error, does not 

justify resentencing unless the rule that declared the practice 

erroneous was a “watershed” rule. See, e.g., Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406, 417–20 (2007); Schriro v. Summerlin, 542 

U.S. 348, 351–52 (2004). The defendant in our case does not 

argue that the prohibition on sentences influenced by increases in the guidelines range after the defendant committed the crime for which he is being sentenced is such a “watershed” rule. He could not make such an argument with a 

straight face given that neither United States v. Booker, 543 

U.S. 220 (2005), which made the Sentencing Guidelines discretionary, nor Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151 (2013), 

which required that facts affecting mandatory minimum 

sentences must be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable 

doubt, have been deemed retroactive, McReynolds v. United 

States, 397 F.3d 479 (7th Cir. 2005); Crayton v. United States, 

799 F.3d 623 (7th Cir. 2015), even though both Booker and Alleyne were very important decisions. The Supreme Court has 

declared only one procedural decision to be a “watershed”: 

Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)—the famous decision that held that the defendant in a criminal case has a 

constitutional right to counsel. So for the defendant to preCase: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
4 No. 14-3216

vail in this case he must first convince us that Peugh’s rule 

was substantive rather than procedural.

The attempt to distinguish between a substantive and a 

procedural rule is not a happy one, at least in the present 

context, because most procedural rules have substantive effects. The right to counsel in a criminal case, the requirement 

of proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict, the right of 

allocution, the right to cross-examine, the right of selfrepresentation—these are all procedural rules, but they have 

profound substantive effects, which is why they doubtless 

are “watershed” rules and therefore criminal defendants can 

invoke them retroactively. But rules altering permissible sentence length are explicitly substantive even when the sentencing judge is not required to impose the higher or lower sentence permitted by the new rule. When Congress increases 

the maximum punishment for some crime there is no effect 

on sentencing procedures—the submission of a presentence 

report prepared by the probation service, the lawyers’ arguments and maybe a witness’s statement, the judge’s questioning, the allocution, the judge’s statement of the sentence 

and of the defendant’s right to appeal (unless waived). So a 

change in the permissible length of a sentence is not procedural. The change does not affect the sentencing process but 

only the sentencing result—the length of the sentence, which 

is a matter of substance no less than the verdict is.

It’s true that a change in the guidelines range does not alter the range of permissible sentences, because the judge 

doesn’t have to sentence within the applicable guidelines 

range; yet the average length of sentences for the crime in 

question is, as noted in Peugh, likely to rise as a result of an 

increase in that range. To call an increase in sentence length, 

Case: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
No. 14-3216 5

however effectuated, “procedural” seems a misuse of the 

word. But although the increase in the guidelines range of 

which the defendant complains both seems substantive and 

postdated his crime, we don’t think he’s entitled to be resentenced.

In the first case in which the Supreme Court considered 

the scope of the ex post facto clause, Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. (3 

U.S.) 386 (1798), Justice Samuel Chase explained that the following retrospective applications of law are prohibited by it: 

“1st. Every law that makes an action, done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; 

and punishes such action. 2nd. Every law that aggravates a 

crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed. 3rd. 

Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when 

committed. 4th. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law 

required at the time of the commission of the offence, in order to convict the offender.” Id. at 390. What the Sentencing 

Commission did when it increased the guidelines range for 

the defendant’s crime in this case could be thought encompassed by Justice Chase’s second and third points, but that is 

not an inevitable conclusion. The principal objection to ex 

post facto laws—the first in Justice Chase’s list—is that they 

punish the defendant, without warning, for conduct that he 

rightly considered lawful when he engaged in it. The objection to increasing retroactively the punishment for conduct 

clearly criminal when the defendant engaged in it is different—it is that the decision whether to comply with a criminal law is normally based on a comparison of the gains and 

losses of violating the law, and the losses depend on the expected sentence if the criminal is caught. Imposing an unCase: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
6 No. 14-3216

foreseen heavier punishment retroactively distorts the ability 

of a potential criminal to make a rational choice. He could 

complain: “if only you had warned me of the consequences, 

I would not have committed the crime.” One could imagine 

the defendant in this case saying that, though he hasn’t done 

so.

But it is a safe bet that it is the rare would-be criminal

who consults the guidelines tables published by the Sentencing Commission in deciding whether to commit a crime. It 

would be a futile search. He could not calculate with any 

confidence where in the applicable range he would be punished if convicted, or indeed whether he would be punished 

within the range instead of more severely or less so by a sentence above or below the range. The top of the range when 

our defendant committed his crime was 151 months, but 

when he was sentenced it was life, and he was sentenced to 

198 months—four years more than the guidelines ceiling 

when he committed the crime, though within the statutory 

maximum and therefore within the limits of his anticipation. 

While Peugh holds that an “increase in the Guidelines range 

applicable to a defendant creates a sufficient risk of a higher 

sentence to constitute an ex post facto violation,” 133 S. Ct. at 

2084, it makes a difference when the increase in the guidelines range takes place. If as in the present case it was before 

Peugh was decided, the concern with overburdening the 

courts with postconviction litigation has controlling weight

because, the guidelines not being binding on the sentencing 

judge, the defendant—provided that the judge does not impose a sentence higher than the statutory maximum when he 

committed his crime—does not “face a punishment that the 

law cannot impose upon him.” Schriro v. Summerlin, supra, 

542 U.S. at 352; see also Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 

Case: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7
No. 14-3216 7

718, 729–30, 734 (2016). As explained in a case comparable to 

this one, Hawkins v. United States, 724 F.3d 915, 919 (7th Cir. 

2013), “fairness to victims of errors in guidelines calculation 

that might or might not have lengthened a sentence (or 

shortened it for that matter, thus conferring a windfall on the 

defendant) must be balanced against the harm to victims of 

judicial delay brought about by judges’ neglect of the social 

interest in judicial finality.” See also Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 

288, 310 (1989).

To summarize: The defendant committed a crime. But before sentencing, the applicable guidelines range was increased and the new range was used in his sentencing, with 

the likely (though not certain, since sentencing within the 

applicable guidelines range is not mandatory) effect of a 

heavier sentence than if the old range had been used instead. 

Then comes Peugh; and considerations of finality persuade 

us that it should not apply retroactively. The sentence was 

within the statutory range and was thus a sentence that the 

judge was constitutionally permitted to give both before and 

after Peugh. Peugh does not require that the defendant be resentenced.

AFFIRMED

Case: 14-3216 Document: 44 Filed: 03/04/2016 Pages: 7