Opinion ID: 815314
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Juvenile Adjudications

Text: Mr. Tavares also challenges the inclusion of two juvenile adjudications in his PSR, each scored as one point under United States Sentencing Guidelines section 4A1.2(d)(2)(B). He raises two issues on appeal, neither of which he raised in the district court. Thus, our review is for plain error. First, Mr. Tavares contends that the Government failed to meet its burden of showing that his juvenile offenses were punished -49- by at least sixty days’ confinement. Mr. Tavares misapprehends the legal standards governing the inclusion of his juvenile adjudications in the PSR. The PSR scored each adjudication under section 4A1.2(d)(2)(B). Under this section, the Government only need establish that the relevant “juvenile sentence [was] imposed within five years of the defendant’s commencement of the instant offense”; it does not have to establish any length of confinement. Mr. Tavares erroneously cites the standard required to score an adjudication as two points, see U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(d)(2)(A), which the PSR did not do. Because Mr. Tavares alleges that the Government failed to meet the requirements of a standard it did not apply, his argument fails. Second, Mr. Tavares urges us to reject the consideration of juvenile adjudications in sentencing on policy grounds. Mr. Tavares notes that his “main contention” is “that since the sentencing guidelines are now advisory rather than mandatory . . . it is open to him to argue that countervailing policies counsel against use of juvenile adjudications in federal sentencing.”43 “The Guidelines specifically provide for certain juvenile adjudications to be considered in evaluating the defendant’s criminal history.” United States v. Gonzalez-Arimont, 268 F.3d 8, 14 (1st Cir. 2001) (citing U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(d)). We consistently 43 Appellant Tavares’s Br. 60. -50- have upheld scoring juvenile adjudications under the Guidelines.44 Certainly, there is no plain error in considering Mr. Tavares’s juvenile adjudications. In any event, as we have noted earlier, Mr. Tavares’s sentence would have been the same even if the juvenile convictions had not been considered. Moreover, Mr. Tavares has eight prior convictions which were each scored one. Mr. Tavares does not challenge the calculation of any of the remaining six one-point convictions. Because the Guidelines provide in section 4A1.1(c) that the maximum number of one-point prior offenses that can be counted in the criminal history category is four, eliminating two of these offenses still leaves six, more than the four permitted. The exclusion of Mr. Tavares’s juvenile adjudications, therefore, would not alter his criminal history category calculation and so would not alter his sentence (even if the district court had based Mr. Tavares’s sentence on his criminal history category, which it did not). Therefore, we decline to consider Mr. Tavares’s policy argument concerning the use of juvenile adjudications.