Opinion ID: 180034
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Nunez's Remaining Arguments on Appeal

Text: Nunez asserts two other arguments on appeal. First, he argues that the information he provided to the government during his first debriefing satisfied the fifth requirement in § 3553(f). Nunez provided detailed information related to the charged offense. But the limits he placed on his second debriefing, without more, warranted concluding that Nunez was ineligible for a safety valve adjustment. See 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f)(5); Montes, 381 F.3d at 634-37. Second, Nunez argues that the fact that the USPO originally found Nunez eligible for a safety valve adjustment when drafting the PSR facially indicates that he met his burden of showing eligibility for the safety valve adjustment. Nunez argues that since he met his burden, the government should have faced a burden of production when calling the information in the PSR into question, and that the burden should have shifted back to the defendant to convince the court that the facts presented were actually true only if the government met its burden of production. Nunez correctly acknowledges that Seventh Circuit case law provides for burden-shifting when a defendant challenges information in a PSR during sentencing. See, e.g., United States v. Moreno-Padilla, 602 F.3d 802, 808-09 (7th Cir.2010). He argues that fundamental fairness supports applying this doctrine when the government challenges information in a PSR. While a government's challenge to a PSR that fails to reference any evidence on the record and is based on pure speculation may not require a defendant to produce more evidence to support the PSR's finding, we have not expressly adopted Nunez's proposed burden-shifting framework. Instead, we maintain that the defendant bears the burden of proving entitlement to a safety valve adjustment, Montes, 381 F.3d at 634, and that a defendant cannot meet his burden if the government challenged the truthfulness, accuracy, or completeness of his statements and he produced nothing to persuade the district court that his disclosures were truthful and complete. Martinez, 301 F.3d at 866. Even if we required the government to produce evidence that Nunez failed to meet the fifth requirement in § 3553(f), it effectively did so when it discussed Nunez's second debriefing at the sentencing hearing, and when it presented CI-1's statement to the district court. The district court correctly concluded that Nunez failed to meet the fifth requirement in § 3553(f).