Source: https://takecareblog.com/blog/the-other-guidelines-predicament
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 14:55:34+00:00

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I’ve written some already about the sentencing fallout from Sessions v. Dimaya and will likely write more in the future. For now, I wanted to highlight one resentencing predicament caused by the Supreme Court’s (misguided, in my view) decision last term in Beckles v. United States. For those of you who haven’t been following Johnson resentencing (and have thus been missing out), Beckles held that the currently “advisory” sentencing guidelines are not subject to vagueness challenges (that is, they cannot be unconstitutionally void for vagueness). Beckles meant that a Sentencing Guideline provision that is worded *the exact same way* as a federal statute would not be unconstitutionally void for vagueness, even though the federal statute would be. Thus, even though Johnson v. United States held the Armed Career Criminal Act’s residual clause void for vagueness, Beckles held that the Sentencing Guideline’s residual clause (U.S.S.G. 4B1.2(a)(2)) was not.
That brings us back to Dimaya, and a similar problem (with one potentially important difference). Dimaya declared section 16(b), the federal definition of “crime of violence,” unconstitutionally void for vagueness, including when the provision is incorporated into immigration statutes. That much is straightforward. But, it turns out, section 16(b) also appears in the advisory Guidelines too. It just appears in the Guidelines in a slightly different way than was the case in Beckles.
That was provision 4B1.2(a)(2). Section 4B1.1 then designated all such persons “category VI” in the criminal history category, which subjected them to higher recommended sentencing ranges.
The Guideline then offers this definition of “aggravated felony”: “Aggravated felony” has the meaning given that term in section 101(a)(43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(43)), without regard to the date of conviction for the aggravated felony.” And 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(43) includes, as a definition of “aggravated felony” “a crime of violence (as defined in section 16 of title 18).” Section 16(b) of title 18 is the provision Dimaya invalidated.
But it doesn’t follow, as Godoy concluded, that the defendant’s sentence should have been affirmed. In an opinion written before Beckles, Judge Ikuta authored a dissent that explains why. The Supreme Court’s sentencing cases require district courts to first accurately calculate a defendant’s Sentencing Guideline’s range. (That’s required as part of the judicially created sentencing procedures that replaced the mandatory Guidelines regime and related appellate review that Booker v. United States invalidated.) And on appeal, appellate court judges must determine whether the district court’s sentence was “procedurally reasonable” and “substantively unreasonable.” And a sentence is procedurally reasonable if the district court failed to calculate (or inaccurately calculated) a defendant’s Guidelines range.
In her dissent in United States v. Lee, Judge Ikuta rejected the suggestion that advisory guidelines could be unconstitutionally vague. But, and this is a big but, she maintained that relying on a vague guideline (that is, one whose language has been held unconstitutionally vague) would be procedurally unreasonable, perhaps because it would be impossible to determine if the guidelines range was correctly calculated. For defendants on direct review, the consequences of Judge Ikuta’s rule and a decision invalidating the guideline as unconstitutionally vague would be similar. But for defendants whose convictions had become final, they might not be (for reasons I briefly discussed in this essay co-written with Shakeer Rahman).
Godoy didn’t consider the possible resolution of the Guidelines predicament that Judge Ikuta floated. Perhaps other courts will. And hopefully the Sentencing Commission will, as it did after Johnson, reconsider its reliance on language that the Supreme Court has determined is hopelessly unclear.

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