IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT

No. 16-11250

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

 Plaintiff - Appellee

v.

MILTON EUGENE ROBINS, 

 Defendant - Appellant

Appeals from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of Texas

USDC No. 3:90-CR-127-1

Before STEWART, Chief Judge, and JONES and CLEMENT, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:*

Defendant-Appellant appeals the district court’s denial of his motion to 

reduce sentence pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2). Because we conclude on 

the record before us that Defendant-Appellant is eligible for a sentence 

reduction under the statute, we vacate and remand.

 

* Pursuant to 5TH CIR. R. 47.5, the court has determined that this opinion should not 

be published and is not precedent except under the limited circumstances set forth in 5TH 

CIR. R. 47.5.4.

United States Court of Appeals

Fifth Circuit

FILED

July 31, 2017

Lyle W. Cayce

Clerk

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I. Facts & Procedural History

Milton Eugene Robins, federal prisoner # 02993-07, was convicted of 

conspiring to possess with intent to deliver more than 100 kilograms of 

marijuana and aiding and abetting his co-defendant’s possession with intent 

to deliver more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana. See United States v. 

Robins, 978 F.2d 881, 884 (5th Cir. 1992) (direct appeal). He is serving a 480-

month term of imprisonment.1 

 Robins recently moved the district court for a sentence reduction 

pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) under Amendment 782 to the Sentencing 

Guidelines. The district court denied his motion based on the Probation 

Office’s recommendation that Robins is ineligible because he “is accountable 

for 90,720 kilograms of marijuana, which establishe[s] a Base Offense level of 

38”—the same base level offense assigned to Robins at his original sentencing

in 1991. Robins filed this appeal.

II. Standard of Review

A district court’s ruling on a sentence reduction under § 3582(c)(2) is 

reviewed for an abuse of discretion. United States v. Evans, 587 F.3d 667, 672 

(5th Cir. 2009). 

III. Discussion

On appeal, Robins argues that the district court erred in determining 

that he was ineligible for a reduced sentence pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2). 

We agree. Section 3582(c)(2) permits the discretionary modification of a 

defendant’s sentence “in the case of a defendant who has been sentenced to a 

term of imprisonment based on a sentencing range that has subsequently been 

lowered by the Sentencing Commission pursuant to 28 U.S.C. [§] 994(o),” so 

 

1 Robins is sixty-six years old and has been incarcerated for approximately twenty-six 

years now.

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long as the reduction is consistent with the applicable policy statements. 18 

U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2); see United States v. Doublin, 572 F.3d 235, 237 (5th Cir. 

2009). “The Supreme Court has prescribed a two-step inquiry for a district 

court that is considering a § 3582(c)(2) motion.” United States v. Benitez, 822 

F.3d 807, 810 (5th Cir. 2016) (per curiam) (citing Dillon v. United States, 560 

U.S. 817, 826 (2010)). First, the district court must “determine whether the 

defendant is eligible for a sentence reduction under § 1B1.10.” Id. (citing 

Dillon, 560 U.S. at 826–27). “At step two of the inquiry, § 3582(c)(2) instructs 

a court to consider any applicable § 3553(a) factors and determine whether, in 

its discretion, the reduction authorized . . . is warranted in whole or in part 

under the particular circumstances of the case.” Dillon, 560 U.S. at 827; see 

also 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). 

Sentencing Guidelines Amendment 782 modified the drug quantity table 

set forth in U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(c), effectively lowering most drug-related base 

offense levels by two levels. See U.S.S.G. Supp. to App. C (Nov. 2016), Amend. 

782. On November 1, 2015, Amendment 782 became retroactively applicable 

to defendants such as Robins who were sentenced prior to its effective date. 

See U.S.S.G. Supp. to App. C (Nov. 2016), Amend. 788. In determining 

whether an amendment has altered a movant’s Sentencing Guidelines range, 

a court shall “determine the amended [G]uideline range that would have been 

applicable if the amendment had been in effect at the time the defendant was 

sentenced.” United States v. Garcia, 655 F.3d 426, 430 (5th Cir. 2011) (internal 

quotation marks and citation omitted). It does “not consider any issues . . . 

other than those raised by the retroactive amendment,” id. at 429, or disturb 

“the findings and calculations that formed the recommended sentencing 

range.” United States v. Jones, 796 F.3d 483, 486 (5th Cir. 2015); see also

U.S.S.G. § 1B1.10(b)(1) (“[T]he court shall substitute only the amendments . . 

. for the corresponding guideline provisions that were applied when the 

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defendant was sentenced and shall leave all other guideline application 

decisions unaffected.”).

Here, the quantity of drugs that the Probation Office attributed to 

Robins in recommending that the district court deny his motion is unsupported 

by the record. At his sentencing in 1991, the Government presented a ledger 

computing the amount that Robins was responsible for as between 48,004 and 

83,345 kilograms of marijuana.2 It did not offer any evidence to support the 

Probation Office’s larger estimated amount of 90,720 kilograms. Nevertheless, 

noting that the Guidelines provided “a substantial margin for error,” the 

district court accepted the Government’s evidence, explaining that any of these 

amounts put the quantity attributable to Robins “somewhere” between 30,000 

kilograms and 100,000 kilograms of marijuana—the 1991 Sentencing 

Guidelines range for a base offense level of 38.3 See U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(c), Level 

 

2 In the Government’s Exhibit 1 presented to the sentencing court, three alternative 

computations for the estimated drug quantities attributable to Robins are shown: (1) between 

59,090 kilograms and 70,454 kilograms, (2) 83,345 kilograms, and (3) 48,004 kilograms. In 

contrast, paragraphs (19) and (25) of the Presentence Report prepared in advance of the 

sentencing hearing state that “[b]ased on analysis of drug ledgers, interviews from 

codefendants, and admissions from the defendant, agents indicate that from 1984 to 1989, a 

conservative estimate of approximately 200,000 to 250,000 pounds of marijuana were 

distributed by the Robins Organization . . . [t]wo hundred thousand (200,000) pounds of 

marijuana converts to 90,720 kilograms of marijuana.” 

3 The district court stated:

I have the obligation of attempting to approximate the quantity of the 

controlled substance during the time the conspiracy was in existence. . . . Here 

the task is made more difficult and complicated by the fact that this was a type 

of business or a series of transactions which because of their illegal nature 

complete records were not kept . . . . Consequently, the Probation Office in 

computing the . . . base offense level [of 38] used . . . the Guidelines manual 

which provides to use that offense level for an amount of marijuana of at least 

thirty thousand but less than a hundred thousand kilograms. Obviously, that 

is a big range of marijuana, and I believe that on the basis of the evidence 

adduced this morning that the efforts that anyone can make to reconstruct or 

approximate the amount of marijuana dealt in by Mr. Robins puts it

somewhere in that range.

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38 (Nov. 1991) (“At least 30,000 KG but less than 100,000 KG of Marihuana”). 

The district court explained that “assuming the inaccuracies of all other figures 

there and reducing them to zero would produce an amount of eighty thousand 

pounds[,] dividing that by 2.2 would still produce a quantity of marijuana in 

excess of thirty thousand kilograms which would put us in the range of 

marijuana to produce a Level 38 as the base offense level.” These statements 

by the district court, vaguely estimating a minimum and maximum quantity 

potentially attributable to Robins cannot reasonably be construed as an 

adoption of the Probation Office’s estimated amount of 90,720 kilograms. 

In United States v. Briscoe, 596 F. App’x 299 (5th Cir. 2015) (per curiam)

(unpublished), we addressed similar facts. There, the Presentence Report

(“PSR”) assigned an estimated drug quantity of 24 kilograms of crack cocaine 

to the defendant. Id. at 300. The sentencing court declined to accept that 

number, however, and instead adopted a range of “somewhere between five 

and 15 kilograms of ‘crack’ cocaine.” Id. Later, the district court denied the

defendant’s Section 3582(c)(2) motion on grounds that he was not eligible for 

relief because he had been held responsible for more than 8.4 kilograms of 

crack cocaine. Id. On appeal, we vacated the district court’s order, observing

that there was evidence in the record that the defendant was personally 

responsible for less than 8.4 kilograms of crack cocaine, implicating the range 

of five to fifteen kilograms accepted by the district court. Id. at 302. We stated 

that in assessing a defendant’s sentencing-reduction eligibility, a district court 

cannot rely on a drug quantity “contradictory to the range set by the sentencing 

court.” Id.; see also United States v. Valentine, 694 F.3d 665, 670 (6th Cir. 

2012) (“[I]f the record does not reflect a specific quantity finding but rather a 

finding or a defendant’s admission that the defendant was responsible for ‘at 

least’ or ‘more than’ a certain amount, then the modification court must make 

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supplemental findings based on the available record to determine if applying 

the retroactive amendment lowers the Guideline range.”). 

Similarly here, the district court denied the motion relying on the larger 

estimated amount of 90,720 kilograms provided by the Probation Office—an 

amount that was not actually adopted by the sentencing court and is higher 

than the drug quantities actually supported by the Government’s evidence at 

sentencing—between 48,004 and 83,345 kilograms. See Briscoe, 596 F. App’x 

at 302. Under the amended Guidelines, the base offense level for the range of 

drug quantities between 48,004 and 83,345 kilograms is 36. See U.S.S.G. § 

2D1.1(c), Level 36 (Nov. 2015) (“At least 30,000 KG but less than 90,000 KG of 

Marihuana”). Thus, Robins is eligible for a sentencing reduction because 

Amendment 782 decreased his base offense level by two. See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.10 

(“Eligibility for consideration under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) is triggered only by 

an amendment . . . that lowers the applicable guideline range.”); United States 

v. Henderson, 636 F.3d 713, 717 (5th Cir. 2011) (“Step one of the [§ 3582(c)(2)] 

inquiry requires the court . . . to determine whether the prisoner is eligible for 

a sentence modification[.]”). Accordingly, we conclude that the district court 

erred in denying Robins’s motion for a reduction on grounds that he was not 

eligible for relief under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2).4

IV. Conclusion

We vacate the district court’s order denying a sentencing reduction based 

on Robins’s ineligibility and remand for further proceedings. See Henderson, 

 

4 A review of our opinion in United States v. Hernandez, 645 F.3d 709 (5th Cir. 2011) 

(per curiam) indicates that it is not controlling here. There, we held that the district court 

did not err in denying the defendant’s motion for sentence reduction. Id. at 713. In that case, 

the district court adopted the specific numerical quantity urged by the PSR which eliminated 

the defendant’s eligibility for a possible sentence reduction. Id. at 712. Here, as explained, 

the district court only agreed that the Government’s evidence supported a finding of a broad 

range of potential quantities attributable to the defendant and never adopted any specific 

numerical quantities presented at sentencing. See id. 

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636 F.3d at 717 (“Step two requires the court to consider any applicable § 

3553(a) factors and determine whether, in its discretion, the reduction 

authorized . . . is warranted in whole or in part under the particular 

circumstances of the case.”) (internal quotation marks, footnote, and citation 

omitted).

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