Opinion ID: 203905
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The New York Conviction

Text: The government was unable to provide a judicial record of the fact of Bryant's New York conviction. The PSR noted that the New York Supreme Court Clerk's office was unable to locate the file for the case. To prove the fact of this conviction, the PSR and the government relied upon the criminal history record maintained by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the New York State Police Information Network (NYSPIN) as well as the incarceration record from the New York Department of Correctional Services. Bryant argues that the government is constrained as to what it can rely on to prove the fact of a conviction, contending that the Supreme Court in Shepard required that the existence of a prior conviction be proved by judicial records. [2] We decline the invitation to read Shepard as broadly as Bryant does. As we have stated previously,  Shepard and its progenitor, Taylor ..., address the appropriate sources for ascertaining the elements of a putative predicate offense when the statute of conviction encompasses both conduct that would constitute a predicate offense and conduct that would not. [3] United States v. Pelletier, 469 F.3d 194, 202 (1st Cir.2006). Specifically, Shepard concerned itself with the sources upon which a sentencing court can rely to determine the character of an offense. See 544 U.S. at 16, 125 S.Ct. 1254. This is a different question than what we are presented with in the instant case. More precisely, we agree with our sister courts that Shepard does not control here because the Shepard Court did not address what documents can be used to prove the fact of a prior conviction.  United States v. Zuniga-Chavez, 464 F.3d 1199, 1204 (10th Cir.2006) (emphasis in original); see also United States v. Neri-Hernandes, 504 F.3d 587, 591 (5th Cir.2007) (ruling that  Shepard does not apply when determining whether the government has satisfied its burden of proof as to the existence of a prior conviction); United States v. Sanders, 470 F.3d 616, 623-24 (6th Cir.2006) (noting that Shepard does not control the inquiry as to whether the government has provided sufficient evidence to establish a fact of the conviction). While Bryant argues that it would make little sense to permit courts to consider a broader array of less reliable, less certain, non-judicial records to determine whether such a conviction even existed, in the first place, it does not logically follow that we should extend Shepard 's rule governing judicial records to the instant facts when the concerns that animated the Supreme Court in Shepard and Taylor are not readily applicable. There is little danger that a sentencing court's inquiry into the existence of a prior conviction would engender the same kind of practical difficulties and potential unfairness that could be present in a determination of whether a defendant's convictions were violent felonies, which was at issue in Shepard and Taylor. Shepard, 544 U.S. at 20, 125 S.Ct. 1254 (quoting Taylor, 495 U.S. at 601, 110 S.Ct. 2143). Establishing the fact of a prior crime is a more discrete inquiry that is not as susceptible to the lengthy and cumbersome collateral trials of the kind the Shepard and Taylor Courts hoped to avoid. Although Shepard does not control here, the district court must nevertheless determine whether the evidence is sufficiently reliable. When a defendant objects to the fact of a conviction as Bryant does here, [4] we have held that: [T]he Government may not simply rely on assertions in a presentence report if those assertions are contested by the defendant. Thus, when the defendant calls into dispute a presentence report's description of an alleged prior conviction, the Government must demonstrate that the description in the report is based on a sufficiently reliable source to establish the accuracy of that description. United States v. Brown, 510 F.3d 57, 75 (1st Cir.2007) (quoting United States v. Price, 409 F.3d 436, 444 (D.C.Cir.2005)). [5] We conclude that the district court, by failing to heed this language from Brown, committed clear error. Here, to prove the fact of this conviction, the PSR and the government relied upon the criminal history record maintained by the NCIC, the NYSPIN, and the incarceration record from the New York Department of Correctional Services. Responding to Bryant's objections to this evidence, the district court stated that based upon the preponderance of the evidence standard... there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this defendant was, in fact, convicted in the so-called New York conviction of a crime that forms a predicate to his being considered to be a career offender. The district court added: I do acknowledge that there are some close questions that had to be determined in making this finding, but the Court does find that the government has sufficiently offered proof to a preponderance of the evidence that both of these crimes were committed and the defendant was convicted of them and, together, they establish that he is, by virtue of this third conviction that he's about to be sentenced for, a career offender. We hold that it was simply not enough for the district court to have relied on the government's recitation of the sources cited in the PSR without any additional inquiry into the reliability of these sources. Unlike certified convictions or other comparable judicial records that detail the fact of a conviction and carry a presumption of reliability sufficient to allow the government to meet its burden, see McKenzie, 539 F.3d at 19 (noting that government may satisfy its burden by producing a certified copy of a conviction or another official court document); Unger, 915 F.2d at 761 (same), we believe that non-judicial records, such as those provided by the government here, should not be afforded the same presumption. The district court clearly erred by not requiring the government to show that the PSR's description of the offense was `based on a sufficiently reliable source to establish the accuracy of that description.' See Brown, 510 F.3d at 75 (quoting Price, 409 F.3d at 444). In the absence of such an inquiry, the district court could not have properly concluded that the government met its burden. [6]