FILED U.S. COURT OF APPEALS ELEVENTH CIRCUIT August 20, 2002 THOMAS K. KAHN CLERK [PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT

________________________ No. 02-11586 Non-Argument Calendar

________________________ D. C. Docket No. 01-00009-CR-DHB-3-1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,

versus GARREY DUTY, JR., a.k.a. Garrey Dooley, Defendant-Appellant.

________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia

_________________________ (August 20, 2002) Before BLACK, MARCUS and COX, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:1 O.C.G.A. § 17-10-7(d) provides: “For th e purpose of this Code section, conviction of two or more crimes charged on separate counts of one indictment or accusation, or in two or more incidents or accusations consolidated for trial, shall be deemed to be only one conviction.” 2 Garrey Duty, Jr. appeals his sentence of 188 months’ imprisonment following his conviction, pursuant to a guilty plea, for distributing five or more grams of cocaine base in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). Reviewing de novo the district court’s application of the Sentencing Guidelines, and reviewing its factual findings for clear
error, see United States v. Snyder , 291 F.3d 1291, 1295 (11th Cir. 2002), we affirm. Duty raises a single issue on appeal: whether the district court erred in sentencing him as a career offender under United States Sentencing Guidelines (“USSG”) § 4B1.1. Section 4B1.1 provides thata defendant is a career offender if: (1) he was at least eighteen years old wh en he committed the offense underlying his conviction; (2) the offense is a felony that is either a crime of vi olence or a controlled substance offense; and (3) the defendant ha s at least two prior felony convictions for either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense. See USSG § 4B1.1. To qualify as two prior felony c onvictions, the prior offenses must be unrelated. See USSG § 4B1.2(c). Duty contends that his guilty pleas on four prior drug-related felony charges in state court should be c ounted as a single conviction pursuant to a Georgia statute, 1 and therefore, the district court erred in finding that he had at least two prior felony drug convictions. We disagree.3 To begin with, the proper definition of the term “conviction” as used in USSG § 4B1.1 is governed by federal law, not state law. See United States v. Fernandez , 234 F.3d 1345, 1347 (11th Cir. 2000). Therefore, the Georgia statute referenced by Duty does not apply to the sentence imposed in this case. Moreover, Duty concedes that his state drug offenses were separate d by intervening arrests, and the Sentencing Guidelines make clear that “[p]rior senten ces are not considered related if they were for offenses that were separated by an intervening arrest ( i.e. , the defendant is arrested for the first offense prior to committing the second offense).” See USSG § 4A1.2. cmt. n.3 (2001). While this court has no published decisi on applying this “intervening arrest” rule, several of our sister circuits have applied the rule to hold that prior convictions are not related where the offenses underlying those convictions are separated by arrests. See , e.g. , United States v. Bradley , 218 F.3d 670, 673-74 (7th Cir. 2000); United States v. Huggins , 191 F.3d 532, 539 (4th Cir. 1999); United States v. Boonphakdee , 40 F.3d 538, 544 (2d Cir. 1994); United States v. Hallman , 23 F.3d 821, 824-25 (3d Cir. 1994); United States v. Davis , 15 F.3d 526, 532-33 (6th Cir. 1994); United States v. Gallegos-Gonzalez , 3 F.3d 325, 327-28 (9th Cir. 1993). We agree with these decisions. Because Duty’sstate drug offenses were separated by intervening arrests, those offenses were notrelated, and the di strict court properly applied § 4B1.1.4 AFFIRMED.