Opinion ID: 77403
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The District Court Properly Considered Anaya-Castro's Prior Convictions.

Text: 16 Anaya-Castro argues that the district court erroneously considered his prior convictions at sentencing because the government neither charged the convictions in the indictment nor proved them beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury and Anaya-Castro did not admit the convictions in his guilty plea. This argument is foreclosed by United States v. Shelton, 400 F.3d 1325, 1329 & n. 4 (11th Cir.2005). In Shelton, we held that Booker left undisturbed the rule of Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224, 118 S.Ct. 1219, 140 L.Ed.2d 350 (1998), that the government need not allege in its indictment and need not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant had prior convictions for a district court to use those convictions for purposes of enhancing a sentence. Id. at 1329.