Opinion ID: 2980303
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Treatment of Guidelines As Mandatory

Text: Though Judge Mays expressly acknowledged the advisory nature of the guidelines, Ransom asserts that Judge Mays nevertheless felt “constrained to apply the guidelines in a mandatory fashion.” As evidence, Ransom construes Judge Mays’s comments to express concern that “he would not be following the ‘rule of law in this country’ were he to vary from the guidelines,” that “he could not pick a number out of thin air, that he was not supposed to be guessing what he might do if Mr. Ransom were somebody else, and that he could not rely on his instincts.” Ransom misreads these quotes by divorcing them from their context. When Judge Mays stated, “It doesn’t work under the rule of law in this country,” the “[i]t” in that comment referred to the act of selecting a sentence without “hav[ing] a reasonable basis for [his] sentence,” not the act of sentencing outside of the guidelines range. Cf. United States v. Johnson, 640 F.3d 195, 205 (6th Cir. 2011) (quoting Gall, 552 U.S. at 51) (“When imposing a procedurally reasonable sentence, the -6- No. 09-5264 United States v. Ransom district court must ‘adequately explain the chosen sentence—including an explanation for any deviation from the Guidelines range.’” (emphasis added in Johnson)). Judge Mays acknowledged that the guidelines sentence initially seemed high to him, and he considered whether he could rationally justify imposing a sentence below the guidelines range. Finding that he could not, he concluded, “the more I look at it, the guidelines appear to be what work here, although, I think they are real heavy.” Judge Mays’s reasoning on the record suggests a reluctance to act arbitrarily, not a reluctance to vary from the guidelines. Judge Mays’s express reasoning for staying within the guidelines suggests that he understood the nonmandatory nature of the guidelines and came to an independent decision not to vary from them in this case because of Ransom’s recidivism. 2. Failure to Consider Need to Avoid Sentence Disparities Under § 3553(a)(6) Section 3553(a)(6) requires sentencing courts to consider “the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6) (2006). Ransom faults Judge Mays for creating national disparities in sentencing by “disregarding” United States v. Ennis, 468 F. Supp. 2d 228 (D. Mass. 2006), and two cases from the Northern District of Ohio that followed Ennis: United States v. Vigorito, No. 4:04-CR-00011, 2007 WL 4125914 (N.D. Ohio Nov. 20, 2007), and United States v. Ortiz, 502 F. Supp. 2d 712 (N.D. Ohio 2007). Section 3553(a)(6) refers to national disparities rather than disparities among co-defendants, but a district judge “may exercise his or her discretion and determine a defendant’s sentence in light -7- No. 09-5264 United States v. Ransom of a co-defendant’s sentence.” United States v. Presley, 547 F.3d 625, 631 (6th Cir. 2008). In Ennis, the district judge exercised her discretion in sentencing a career-offender below the guidelines range to avoid the anomalous situation of the street vendor with career-offender status receiving a stiffer sentence than the more culpable co-defendant drug suppliers who had sufficiently distanced themselves from the streets to have minimal criminal records. Id. at 230-31, 233 (applying this rationale to conclude that drug quantity overstated Ennis’s minor role in conspiracy). Rather than “disregarding” Ennis, Judge Mays explicitly distinguished the Ennis sentencing situation from Ransom’s. He went on, selecting a sentence consistent with the national guidelines “for uniformity purposes.” Nor do Vigorito and Ortiz compel a finding of abuse of discretion in Ransom’s case. While the district judge in Vigorito evaluated a career offender with the same criminal history category facing the same sentence range as Ransom, that judge found the predicate offenses minor and gave weight to Vigorito’s efforts to improve himself in prison before concluding that the tripling effect of the career offender guideline appeared too harsh given the § 3553(a) analysis for that case. See Vigorito, 2007 WL 4125914, at -8. By contrast, Judge Mays concluded after examining the drug quantities reported in Ransom’s criminal history that Ransom’s criminal history understated the seriousness of Ransom’s drug-trafficking activities, noting with particular concern the $1,000 found on Ransom’s person during one offense and Ransom’s pattern of recidivism. The district judge in Ortiz faced a co-defendant disparity problem more akin to the situation in Ennis than the situation before Judge Mays. That district judge explained that a sentence in the career offender guideline -8- No. 09-5264 United States v. Ransom range “would have been greater than necessary, especially given the sentences for the codefendants,” Ortiz, 502 F. Supp. 2d at 719 (emphasis added), and he focused exclusively on the disparity between co-defendants in his analysis of § 3553(a)(6)’s uniformity factor. Ransom’s three distinguishable cases concerning career offenders fail to persuade us that Judge Mays abused his discretion here.