Opinion ID: 222147
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: State Road 47

Text: The district court took judicial notice of SR 47's location and characteristics to infer that a longtime local resident such as Ms. Lente would know it is a well-traveled road. R. Vol. 1 at 445. The court relied on this inference to support its finding that Ms. Lente was excessively reckless when she drove on SR 47 after a day of heavy drinking. Id. Ms. Lente complains that the court made assumptions about traffic conditions on SR 47 at the specific time and place of the accident and that she was not provided sufficient notice or opportunity to be heard on this issue. The court did not, as Ms. Lente suggests, do anything more than find SR 47 to be a well-traveled road and that Ms. Lente knew it to be so. These findings combined with a drunk driver's choosing to drive on SR 47 are relevant to recklessness and relate to the nature and circumstances of the offense. See § 3553(a)(1). Although more specific information about traffic congestion at the time and place of the accident may have been more probative, we find no procedural error in the court's considering the general nature of the road in its recklessness analysis. If Ms. Lente objects to the weight of this factor in determining recklessness, that is a substantive reasonableness argument, which we do not address here. As for Ms. Lente's procedural due process argument, although she received late notice about the SR 47 issue, the court afforded her a hearing on this subject. We do not discern a significant procedural error. Even if we did, we do not think its correction would have affected the sentence, and it is therefore harmless. We turn next to harmless error on the other procedural matters.