Opinion ID: 1262661
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the effect of an incorrect guidelines calculation

Text: Although the Guidelines are now advisory and a sentencing court has great discretion over the substance of the sentence, the correct calculation of the applicable Guidelines range remains an important procedural requirement. First of all, as before Booker, the sentencing court is required to calculate the Guidelines range in each case, and that calculation is the focus of the parties' arguments. Second, a district court is required to consider the Guidelines range, pursuant to § 3553(a)(4), and use that range as a starting point for the entirety of the § 3553(a) analysis. Based on its consideration of the § 3553(a) factors, the. Court must state the reasons for its sentence and explain whether a within-Guidelines sentence is appropriate in the particular case, a process which generally will require a correct Guidelines calculation. Third and finally, a correctly calculated Guidelines range will often be a necessary precondition of our reasonableness review. Where a district court begins with an erroneous range, it will be difficult for us to determine that it fulfilled its duty to consider the Guidelines and reason through to the ultimate sentence. We will discuss these considerations in turn.
In rendering the Guidelines advisory, the Supreme Court made clear that sentencing courts are required to consider the Guidelines in crafting a sentence. United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 245-46, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005). Our Court thereafter provided district courts with a three-step process to follow in order to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling in Booker: (1) Courts must continue to calculate a defendant's Guidelines sentence precisely as they would have before Booker. (2) In doing so, they must formally rule on the motions of both parties and state on the record whether they are granting a departure and how that departure affects the Guidelines calculation, and take into account our Circuit's pre- Booker. case law, which continues to have advisory force. (3) Finally, they are to exercise their discretion by considering the relevant § 3553(a) factors in setting the sentence they impose regardless of whether it varies from the sentence calculated under the Guidelines. United States v. Gunter, 462 F.3d 237, 247 (3d Cir.2006) (quotation marks, brackets, and citations omitted); see also United States v. Hawk Wing, 433 F.3d 622, 631 (8th Cir.2006) (stating that courts should calculate Guidelines ranges just as they would have before Booker ); United States v. Crosby, 397 F.3d 103, 112 (2d Cir.2005) (The applicable Guidelines range is normally to be determined in the same manner as before Booker/Fanfan .). When a sentencing court miscalculates the applicable range, it fails to discharge its duties under step one of Gunter. As we made clear in United States v. Jackson , because the Guidelines still play an integral role in criminal sentencing, we require that the entirety of the Guidelines calculation be done correctly. 467 F.3d 834, 838 n. 4 (3d Cir.2006) (citations omitted).
The correct Guidelines calculation is not merely one of three steps, but rather constitutes the natural starting point from which the sentencing court exercises its discretion under § 3553(a) at Gunter's third step. United States v. Cooper, 437 F.3d 324, 331 (3d Cir.2006). As the Supreme Court recently confirmed in Gall v. United States, a district court should begin all sentencing proceedings by correctly calculating the applicable Guidelines range. As a matter of administration and to secure nationwide consistency, the Guidelines should be the starting point and the initial benchmark. ___ U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. 586, 596, 169 L.Ed.2d 445 (2007). The Court further observed that [t]he fact that § 3553(a) explicitly directs sentencing courts to consider the Guidelines supports the premise that district courts must begin their analysis with the Guidelines and remain cognizant of them throughout the sentencing process. Id. at 597 n. 6. The failure to correctly apply the Guidelines was specifically listed by the Supreme Court in Gall as a significant procedural error. Id. at 597. A correct calculation, therefore, is crucial to the sentencing process and result. An erroneous calculation of the Guidelines will frustrate the sentencing court's ability to give meaningful consideration to the kinds of sentence and the sentencing range established for . . . the applicable category of offense committed by the applicable category of defendant as set forth in the guidelines. . . . as required by 18 U.S.C. 3553(a)(4). The Supreme Court recently noted that [a] district judge must include the Guidelines range in the array of factors warranting consideration. Kimbrough v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. 558, 564, 169 L.Ed.2d 481 (2007) (emphasis added). As we have observed, [b]ecause the Guidelines reflect the collected wisdom of various institutions, they deserve careful consideration in each case. Because they have been produced at Congress's direction, they cannot be ignored. United States v. Goff 501 F.3d 250, 257 (3d Cir.2007); accord United States v. Lalonde, 509 F.3d 750, 763 & n. 5 (6th Cir.2007) (noting that after Gall, a court of appeals cannot find that a sentencing court has properly considered the § 3553(a) factors if it miscalculated the advisory Guidelines range). The proper Guidelines benchmarksoffense level, criminal history, enhancements, and ultimate rangeare necessary prerequisites to a court's analysis under 3553(a)(4) in general and, more specifically, § 3553(a)(6) (concerning disparity between defendants) and § 3553(a)(5) (having to do with the Sentencing Commission commentary). For example, where a court miscalculates a defendant's criminal history, its attempts to avoid disparity between defendants pursuant to § 3553(a)(6) will be misguided as it ineluctably will compare the defendant to others who have committed the same offense but are in a different criminal history category. Similarly, if a sentencing court incorrectly decides that a reckless endangerment adjustment under U.S.S.G. § 3C1.2 applies, it may rely on inapplicable Sentencing Commission comments as it evaluates the § 3553(a) factors. Moreover, a sentencing court's exercise of its discretion to impose a sentence outside the Guidelines range or to determine that a within-Guidelines sentence is `greater than necessary' to serve the objectives of sentencing, Kimbrough, 128 S.Ct. at 564, will necessarily be skewed when it misperceives the applicable range. Without knowing the correct range, a district court may impose an outside-the-Guidelines sentence without providing adequate explanation or, alternately, may impose a sentence believed to be at, one end of the range or below the range, but that actually falls within the correct range. Imposing a sentence outside the correctly calculated Guidelines range without explanation would fly in the face of the Supreme Court's and our precedent. As the Supreme Court noted in Rita v. United States , § 3553(c) calls for a sentencing judge at the time of sentencing to state in open court the reasons for its imposition of the particular sentence. ___ U.S. ___, 127 S.Ct. 2456, 2468, 168 L.Ed.2d 203 (2007). Without a correct Guidelines range, a sentencing court will fail to comply with the Supreme Court's holding that a sentencing court must properly justify a sentence based on the record and Guidelines calculation before it. Id. at 2465-68 (reiterating the importance of the sentencing court's subjecting the sentence to thorough adversarial testing). As we said in United States v. Fisher, [i]f, after calculating the appropriate Guidelines, a district judge finds that the imposition of a within-Guidelines sentence would visit an injustice upon the defendant pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), it is incumbent upon the judge to say so, and sentence below the Guidelines' range. Conversely, when the Guidelines range is too low to satisfy 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), the district judge must explain why this is so and vary upward. 502 F.3d 293, 308 (3d Cir.2007) ( citing Rita, 127 S.Ct. at 2464, 2466). Due process concerns underlie these requirements. United States v. Ausburn, 502 F.3d 313, 322 (3d Cir.2007) ([D]ue process in criminal sentencing requires that a defendant receive notice of, and a reasonable opportunity to comment on, (a) the alleged factual predicate for his sentence, and (b) the potential punishments which may be imposed at sentence.); United States v. Fuller, 426 F.3d 556, 565 (2d Cir.2005) (in discussing the pre- and post- Booker cases, the court noted that a district court's failure to comply with § 3553(c)(2) denies a defendant the right to argue more effectively . . . whether . . . a sentence is `reasonable'').
Our reasonableness review relies on a district court's reasoning from the starting point of the correctly calculated Guidelines through the § 3553(a) factors. Our Court, our sister courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court agree that a district court's use of the incorrect Guidelines range impedes our ability to conduct review of the ultimate sentence. We have emphasized that a sentencing court's failure to execute Gunter's first step will tend to thwart our reasonableness review. See Jackson, 467 F.3d at 838-39 ([D]istrict courts must still calculate what the proper Guidelines sentencing range is, otherwise the Guidelines cannot be considered properly at Gunter's third step.). For, the correct computation of the Guidelines range and any departures therefrom serves to clarify the basis for the sentence imposed and thus facilitates reasonableness review. United States v. Floyd, 499 F.3d 308, 311 (3d Cir.2007). In United States v. Ali, we explained that, by relying on an incorrectly calculated Guidelines range and an improper departure determination, a sentencing judge necessarily was unable meaningfully to consider the recommended Guidelines range as required by § 3553(a)(4). 508 F.3d 136, 154 (3d Cir.2007). Thus, we concluded, the preliminary errors at steps one and two tainted the step three analysis and resulting sentence. Id. (remanding for resentencing based on the court's error at Gunter's step one). Our sister courts of appeals agree that the correct guidelines range is still the critical starting point for the imposition of a sentence and a prerequisite to reasonableness review. Crawford, 407 F.3d at 1178-79; Hawk Wing, 433 F.3d at 631 (internal quotation marks omitted); United States v. Zeigler, 463 F.3d 814, 819 (8th Cir.2006) (Hansen, J., concurring) (Generally, if the district court errs in applying the Guidelines at step one or fails to consider a requested departure at step two, we cannot conduct a reasonableness review because the district court's critical starting point, a correctly determined advisory Guidelines range, may be flawed.); United States v. Staten, 466 F.3d 708, 713 (9th Cir.2006) (If . . . `there was material error in the Guidelines calculation that serves as the starting point for the district court's sentencing decision, we will remand for resentencing pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3742(f), without reaching the question of whether the sentence as a whole is reasonable in light of § 3553(a).'). As the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has stated, where the sentence fails the first step of our analysis [because of an incorrect application of the Guidelines], we need not reach the second step, a determination of whether the imposed sentence is reasonable in light of § 3553(a). United States v. Moshek, 406 F.3d 1012, 1020 (8th Cir.2005); see also United States v. Williams, 456 F.3d 1353, 1360 (11th Cir. 2006) (only if the Guidelines calculation is correct or the error harmless can the court go on to consider whether the sentence is reasonable); United States v. Hernandez-Castillo, 449 F.3d 1127, 1129-30 (10th Cir. 2006) (same). The importance of a correctly calculated range to our reasonableness review is evident in the Supreme Court's opinions as well. While Gall reinforced a district court's discretionary authority to choose the substance of a sentence, it also clarified the role of courts of appeals in reviewing procedural and substantive errors in sentencing. In both Gall and Kimbrough, the Court began by noting that the sentencing court had properly calculated and considered the advisory Guidelines range and only then turned to the sentencing court's consideration of the § 3553(a) factors. Kimbrough, 128 S.Ct. at 575; Gall, 128 S.Ct. at 598. Accordingly, in Gall, the Court instructed us to ensure that the district court committed no significant procedural error, such as failing to calculate (or improperly calculating) the Guidelines range, treating the Guidelines as mandatory, failing to consider the § 3553(a) factors, selecting a sentence based on clearly erroneous facts, or failing to adequately explain the chosen sentence-including an explanation for any deviation from the Guidelines range before considering the substantive reasonableness of a sentence. Gall, 128 S.Ct. at 597. This first step, ensuring that the sentencing court did not make a procedural error, is increasingly important in light of the Supreme Court's decision that a Guidelines sentence will usually be reasonable. Rita, 127 S.Ct. at 2468. In sum, while the district court is free to make its own reasonable application of the § 3553(a) factors, and to reject (after due consideration) the advice of the Guidelines, Kimbrough, 128 S.Ct. at 577 (Scalia, J., concurring), it must first duly consider the correct Guidelines. Thus, a district court's incorrect Guidelines calculation will thwart not only its ability to accomplish the analysis it is to undertake, but our reasonableness review as well.