Opinion ID: 173551
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Error in the Enhancement Information

Text: In his third claim on appeal, Mr. Hood contends that the district court should not have sentenced him to a mandatory term of life imprisonment because the government's Enhancement Information contained what he believes to be a non-clerical, prejudicial error viz., the Information lists the incorrect court and place of conviction for one of his predicate prior drug convictions. Accordingly, Mr. Hood argues that the error could not be corrected prior to sentencing, in the way that a clerical mistake may be amended under 21 U.S.C. § 851(a)(1). The error, he contends, resulted in his failure to identify the particular conviction upon which the Enhancement Information relied and Mr. Hood urges us to conclude that the district court erred by enhancing his sentence. We find that any error was harmless. We review de novo the legality of a sentence, including the adequacy of an information filed under § 851. See United States v. Gonzalez-Lerma, 14 F.3d 1479, 1484 (10th Cir.1994), overruled on other grounds by United States v. Botero-Ospina, 71 F.3d 783, 787 (10th Cir.1995); accord United States v. King, 127 F.3d 483, 487 (6th Cir.1997). Section 851 provides in relevant part that No person who stands convicted of an offense under this part shall be sentenced to increased punishment by reason of one or more prior convictions, unless before trial, or before entry of a plea of guilty, the United States attorney files an information with the court (and serves a copy of such information on the person or counsel for the person) stating in writing the previous convictions to be relied upon. Upon a showing by the United States attorney that facts regarding prior convictions could not with due diligence be obtained prior to trial or before entry of a plea of guilty, the court may postpone the trial or the taking of the plea of guilty for a reasonable period for the purpose of obtaining such facts. Clerical mistakes in the information may be amended at any time prior to the pronouncement of sentence. 21 U.S.C. § 851(a)(1). A district court cannot impose an enhanced sentence unless the Government complies with § 851(a)'s requirements. United States v. Balderama-Iribe, 490 F.3d 1199, 1204 (10th Cir.2007). Mr. Hood asserts that [t]he question in this appeal is whether the identification of the wrong court and location is a clerical error capable of correction, or if it is such that the Information was insufficient to enhance Mr. Hood's sentence to life imprisonment. Aplt. Opening Br. at 37. In other words, Mr. Hood posits that if we are unable to conclude that the error in the Enhancement Information is a correctable clerical error, we must determine that the Enhancement Information cannot provide the basis for his life sentence and, accordingly, declare that sentence to be fatally infirm. Our decisional options, however, are not so narrowly circumscribed. Even if we were to conclude that the error in the Enhancement Information was more than a correctable clerical error (i.e., non-clerical), we still would be free to conclude that such an error was harmless. In Gonzalez-Lerma, for example, we effectively endorsed and applied a harmless-error analysis. 14 F.3d at 1486. There, the Enhancement Information contained an incorrect date of conviction, did not specify the place of conviction other than specifying the state in which the conviction occurred, and did not provide a case number. Id. at 1485. We determined that the incorrect date was a clerical mistake that could be amended any time prior to the pronouncement of sentence under § 851(a)(1). Id. at 1486. As for the omitted information regarding the precise location of the conviction and the case number, we determined that, despite those omissions, the government's Enhancement Information provided sufficient notice to the defendant of its intent to enhance his sentence based on the prior conviction. Id. We said that § 851 was enacted to fulfill the due process requirement that a defendant receive reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard relative to the recidivist charge even if due process does not require that notice be given prior to trial on the substantive offense, and determined that the defendant had received sufficient notice and an opportunity to be heard. Id. at 1485-86 (internal quotation marks omitted). The government had allowed defense counsel to explore the contents of the judgment and the defendant had not challenged his prior conviction, but rather had challenged the timing of the Enhancement Information and its specificity. Id. at 1486. We applied harmless error review and declined to adopt a hyptertechnical approach to § 851. Id. We also applied a harmless-error analysis in United States v. Lopez-Gutierrez, 83 F.3d 1235, 1246 (10th Cir.1996), which involved a decidedly non-clerical error. In that case, the district court had failed to comply with § 851(b) when it did not ask the defendant whether he affirmed or denied the previous conviction. Id. We concluded that the error was harmless: the defendant did not allege any prejudice caused by the omission, and the defense counsel had conceded the fact of the previous conviction during a pre-trial motion. Id. at 1246-47. Accordingly, our precedent indicates that even if we find that an error is non-clerical viz., not an error subject to correction under § 851(a)(1)'s express termswe nonetheless may conduct an inquiry into whether any such error was prejudicial. See also United States v. Severino, 316 F.3d 939, 944 (9th Cir.2003) (The clerical error provision, which allows the government to correct `clerical mistakes' in an information before sentencing, does not raise the inference that no other mistakes are permitted. . . . If the error is deemed to be clerical, the government may simply correct it by filing an amended information without showing that defendant was not misled. If the error is non-clerical, however, the information is deemed defective unless the government shows that defendant could not reasonably have been misled to his prejudice as to the identity of the prior conviction. (footnote omitted)). Applying these principles here, we conclude that even if we were to accept Mr. Hood's contention that the Enhancement Information's error regarding the court and place of conviction was not clerical, we would still reject his challenge to the Enhancement Information on harmless-error grounds because he was not prejudiced. [6] Mr. Hood has not disputed that he received a copy of the relevant police report for that conviction as well as a pretrial report that accurately recounted his criminal history. Moreover, although the Enhancement Information identified the wrong court and location for the relevant conviction, it did include other correct identifiers like the proper case number. Significantly, at the time Mr. Hood filed his objections to the PSR, he expressed (through counsel) his actual knowledge of a conviction associated with his name that had all of the same information found in the Enhancement Information and, in addition, had the correct court and location of conviction. In other words, at the time he filed his sentencing objections, Mr. Hood was aware of facts that would have allowed him to reasonably infer that the conviction of which he had knowledge was the same conviction listed in the Enhancement Information, notwithstanding its flawed description there. And finally, at the sentencing hearing, defense counsel explicitly declined to contest that Mr. Hood was in fact the person who had suffered the at-issue conviction listed in the Enhancement Information. Because Mr. Hood had sufficient notice of the prior conviction upon which the government sought enhancement as well as an opportunity to be heard, the Enhancement Information's incorrect identification of the court and place of conviction would be at most harmless error. We therefore affirm the district court's enhancement of Mr. Hood's sentence. [7]