Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-02719/USCOURTS-ca7-15-02719-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Lashone Owens
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit 

Chicago, Illinois 60604 

Submitted February 22, 2016*

Decided February 22, 2016 

Before 

FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge

MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge 

DIANE S. SYKES, Circuit Judge

No. 15-2719 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v. 

LASHONE OWENS, 

 Defendant-Appellant.

 Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Southern District of Indiana, 

Indianapolis Division. 

No. 1:09 CR 00089-001 

Larry J. McKinney, 

District Judge. 

O R D E R 

 Lashone Owens appeals the denial of his motion under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) for a 

sentence reduction based on Amendment 782 to the Sentencing Guidelines, which 

retroactively lowered the base offense level for most drug crimes. See U.S.S.G. 

§ 1B1.10(d); id. Supp. to App. C., amends. 782, 788 (2014). The district court denied the 

motion on the ground that a binding plea agreement, not the guidelines range, 

 

*

 After examining the briefs and the record, we have concluded that oral 

argument is unnecessary. Thus, the appeal is submitted on the briefs and the record.

See FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C). 

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 

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No. 15-2719 Page 2 

established Owens’s sentence, and thus he is ineligible for a reduction. See FED. R. CRIM.

P. 11(c)(1)(C). We affirm the denial of the motion. 

 For several years Owens supplied Indiana dealers with marijuana he shipped 

from Arizona. Initially his couriers used rental cars to move marijuana and currency 

between the two states, but later he formed a trucking company to transport the 

marijuana. Owens also used that company and a construction business to launder his 

drug proceeds. An investigation by the DEA and IRS led to Owens’s arrest in 2008. As 

part of a binding agreement between the parties, Owens pleaded guilty to conspiracy to 

possess with intent to distribute marijuana, 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), and structuring 

financial transactions to evade bank reporting requirements, 31 U.S.C. § 5324(a). In 

return the government declined to seek a recidivism enhancement, see 21 U.S.C. § 851, or 

to allege that the amount of marijuana was at least 1,000 kilograms, see id. § 841(b)(1)(A). 

Those steps would have mandated a statutory minimum of at least 20 years. The 

government also agreed with Owens that although he is a career offender under the 

guidelines, see U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1, that provision overstates his criminal history. The parties 

agreed that a prison sentence of 121 to 151 months was appropriate, and Owens also 

agreed “not to contest his conviction or sentence or seek to modify his sentence or the 

manner in which it was determined in any type of proceeding, including, but not limited 

to, an action brought under 28 U.S.C. § 2255.” The district court accepted the plea 

agreement and sentenced Owens to a total of 121 months’ imprisonment. The court did 

not determine Owens’s offense level or criminal-history category, instead stating that it 

accepted the range of imprisonment provided in the binding plea agreement. 

 In opposing Owens’s motion under § 3582(c)(2), the government relied 

exclusively on the binding nature of the plea agreement, see FED. R. CRIM. P. 11(c)(1)(C), 

and did not seek to enforce the explicit waiver in that agreement for motions to 

“modify” the sentence. The waiver would seem to cover this matter, cf. United States v. 

Woods, 581 F.3d 531, 533, 536 (7th Cir. 2009); United States v. Monroe, 580 F.3d 552, 555–56, 

559 (7th Cir. 2009), but the government’s choice to forgo asserting it relieved Owens of 

his promise not to seek a reduction, see United States v. Kieffer, 794 F.3d 850, 852 (7th Cir. 

2015); United States v. Adigun, 703 F.3d 1014, 1022 (7th Cir. 2012). The district court 

followed the government’s approach in denying Owens’s motion. 

A term of imprisonment may be modified if it is “based on a sentencing range 

that has subsequently been lowered by the Sentencing Commission.” § 3582(c)(2); 

see United States v. Stevenson, 749 F.3d 667, 669 (7th Cir. 2014). That condition is not 

satisfied in the case of a Rule 11(c)(1)(C) plea agreement, however, unless the agreement 

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calls for the defendant to be sentenced within a particular guidelines range or specifies 

that the agreed sentence resulted from applying the guidelines. See Freeman v. United 

States, 131 S. Ct. 2685, 2697 (2011) (Sotomayor, J., concurring); United States v. Scott, 

711 F.3d 784, 787 (7th Cir. 2013); United States v. Dixon, 687 F.3d 356, 359 (7th Cir. 2012). 

Owens’s plea agreement does not tie the proposed range of imprisonment to the 

sentencing guidelines. Instead, despite recognizing during their negotiations that Owens 

is a career offender under the guidelines, see Freeman, 131 S. Ct. at 2697 (Sotomajor, J., 

concurring), the parties rejected relying on that provision—or any other range calculated 

by reference to the sentencing guidelines—in selecting an appropriate sentence. Thus, as 

the district court concluded, Owens is not eligible for a sentence reduction premised on 

Amendment 782. 

Owens’s attempt to evade his plea agreement is unpersuasive. He argues that the 

agreement cannot be the basis of his sentence because, he says, the government 

misrepresented as a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, one of the convictions assumed 

to make him a career offender. Had the district court been properly informed, Owens 

continues, the court never would have accepted the plea agreement, and so he should

have been sentenced under the guidelines range that would have applied using U.S.S.G. 

§ 2D1.1. But whether this logic is sound is irrelevant, because the district court did accept 

the plea agreement and explicitly adopted the agreed range of imprisonment without 

making independent findings about the applicable guidelines range. Owens’s sentence, 

therefore, is based on the plea agreement, not the sentencing guidelines. 

AFFIRMED. 

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