Opinion ID: 583594
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The District Court's Authority To Resentence

Text: 11 Under the Sentencing Guidelines, district courts have retained the pre-Guidelines power to correct their own obvious errors in sentencing. United States v. Uccio, 917 F.2d 80, 84 (2d Cir.1990). The rationale for this power is to avoid the waste of judicial resources that would ensue if an appeal and remand were always required in order to impose the correct sentence. Id. The power to correct errors in sentencing does not, however, extend to a situation where the district judge simply changes his [or her] mind about the sentence. United States v. Cook, 890 F.2d 672, 675 (4th Cir.1989). According to the government, the district judge did not resentence Arjoon to correct an obvious error made in calculating the original sentence, but he did so because he had simply changed his mind as to the appropriate sentence to impose. 12 The power to correct sentencing errors has been upheld in only a limited number of cases where the error was obvious, i.e., where egregious mistakes were made. See, e.g., United States v. Uccio, 917 F.2d at 85 (district court erroneously sentenced defendant to concurrent terms of imprisonment rather than consecutive terms as mandated by the Sentencing Guidelines); United States v. Rico, 902 F.2d 1065, 1069 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 352, 112 L.Ed.2d 316 (1990) (district court mistakenly imposed a sentence different from the one to which the parties had agreed and where the judge had intended to abide by the agreement). Unlike Uccio or Rico, the second sentencing proceeding in the instant case was not convened to discuss the belated discovery of an inadvertent error in the sentencing process. Rather, as the district court candidly explained, it was distressed by the fact that the Sentencing Guidelines prescribed a lower sentencing range for a gun-trafficker than for Arjoon, an embezzler. This plainly does not constitute the kind of obvious error which the district court has power to remedy, but instead constitutes a change of heart. 13 Accordingly, we hold that the district court was without authority to alter its initial sentence. However, assuming the district court had the authority to resentence Arjoon, we next consider the propriety of the district court's downward departure.