Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca4-19-07114/USCOURTS-ca4-19-07114-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Steven Blackwell
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

UNPUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 19-7114

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

STEVEN BLACKWELL,

Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, at Baltimore. 

James K. Bredar, Chief District Judge. (1:10-cr-00493-JKB-1)

Submitted: January 9, 2020 Decided: January 16, 2020

Before WILKINSON and THACKER, Circuit Judges, and TRAXLER, Senior Circuit 

Judge.

Vacated and remanded by unpublished per curiam opinion.

James Wyda, Federal Public Defender, Sapna Mirchandani, Appellate Attorney, OFFICE 

OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellant. Ellen 

Nazmy, Special Assistant United States Attorney, Lauren Konczos, Volunteer Student Law 

Clerk, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Greenbelt, Maryland, for 

Appellee.

Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.

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PER CURIAM:

Steven Blackwell appeals the district court’s order denying his 18 U.S.C. 

§ 3582(c)(2) (2018) motion for a sentence reduction based on Sentencing Guidelines 

Amendment 782. On appeal, Blackwell primarily challenges the sufficiency of the district 

court’s explanation. For the reasons that follow, we vacate and remand.

“[A] sentence modification is not a plenary resentencing proceeding,” United States 

v. Martin, 916 F.3d 389, 396 (4th Cir. 2019) (internal quotation marks omitted), and, 

“absent a contrary indication, we presume a district court deciding a § 3582(c)(2) motion 

has considered the 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) [(2018)] factors and other pertinent matters before 

it,” United States v. Smalls, 720 F.3d 193, 195-96 (4th Cir. 2013) (internal quotation marks 

omitted) (citing United States v. Legree, 205 F.3d 724, 728-29 (4th Cir. 2000)). However, 

a defendant may use mitigating evidence to rebut this presumption, Martin, 916 F.3d at 

396, at which point the district court must then provide the defendant with an individualized 

explanation for its resolution of the motion, id. at 397. And while the issue of a defendant’s 

entitlement to a sentence reduction remains committed to the district court’s sound 

discretion, see id. at 395, “a district court cannot ignore a host of mitigation evidence and 

summarily deny a motion to reduce a sentence and leave both the defendant and the 

appellate court in the dark as to the reasons for its decision,” id. at 398. Whether the district 

court was required to provide an individualized explanation for its § 3582(c)(2) decision is 

a question of law we review de novo. Id. at 395.

Here, Blackwell argued that he deserved a sentence reduction in view of the 

substantial progress he had made during his incarceration, including earning his GED, 

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moving down to the lowest security classification, serving as an orderly in the prison’s

recreational facility, and receiving positive reviews from his case manager and prison 

counselor. In opposition, the Government asserted that Blackwell, who stood convicted of 

three nominally nonviolent conspiracies, involved himself in several episodes of serious, 

gang-related violence prior to his arrest. In reply, Blackwell maintained that such 

allegations—taken from various media reports—were outside the scope of the factual 

narrative to which the parties agreed during the underlying plea proceedings. In a summary 

order, the district court denied the motion, noting its “consideration of the full scope of the 

record, particularly the circumstances agreed by the parties at the time of the conviction.” 

(J.A.1 88).

We conclude that Blackwell’s submission of several pieces of post-sentencing 

mitigation evidence adequately rebutted the so-called Legree presumption, thus requiring 

the district court to provide an individualized explanation for its denial of the § 3582(c)(2) 

motion.

2 Furthermore, exercising our broad discretion when reviewing § 3582(c)(2) 

orders, Martin, 916 F.3d at 398, we observe other deficiencies in the court’s order that 

warrant clarification on remand. First, we are unable to discern what the court meant when

alluding to the “circumstances agreed by the parties at the time of the conviction.” (J.A. 

 1 Citations to “J.A.” refer to the joint appendix filed by the parties in this appeal.

2 We note that the Government has disputed some of Blackwell’s evidence, thereby 

providing additional reason for the district court to explain its decision. See Martin, 916 

F.3d at 396 (indicating that motion’s complexity weighs in favor of individualized 

explanation).

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88). Insofar as the court intended to refer to the factual findings laid out in the presentence 

report and adopted at sentencing, we note that a mere “recitation of [the defendant’s] 

original criminal behavior . . . is not the standard . . . for sentence-reduction motions.” 

Martin, 916 F.3d at 397. In addition, the court’s summary order leaves unanswered 

whether the court credited the media accounts of Blackwell’s violent past and, if so, 

whether reliance on such evidence was permissible.

Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s order and remand so that the district court 

can provide “a more robust and detailed explanation for why it denied [Blackwell’s] motion

to reduce.” Id. at 396. We of course express no view on the merits of that motion. 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.

VACATED AND REMANDED

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