Opinion ID: 3004712
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Constitutional Challenge Under Alleyne

Text: First, Ellis argues that the court violated his Sixth Amendment rights by sentencing him to a mandatory-minimum fifteen-year sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), without requiring the government to prove his previous convictions to the jury. He relies on Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151, 2155 (2013), which held that “[a]ny fact that, by law, increases the penalty for a crime is an ‘element’ that must be submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt.” But Alleyne expressly declined to address whether its holding applied to the fact of prior convictions, leaving intact the “narrow exception” recognized in Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224 (1998). Alleyne, 133 S. Ct. at 2160 n.1. And our published decisions instruct that Almendarez-Torres’s carve-out remains good law until expressly overruled by the Supreme Court, foreclosing Ellis’s constitutional challenge. See, e.g., United States v. Nagy, 760 F.3d 485, 488–89 (6th Cir. 2014) (affirming mandatory-minimum § 924(e) sentence); United States v. Cooper, 739 F.3d 873, 884 (6th Cir. 2014) (affirming sentence imposed under the career-offender sentencing guidelines). B. Challenge to the Application of the Career-Offender Guidelines Ellis also challenges the district court’s finding that he had previously been convicted of at least two felony crimes of violence or controlled substance offenses and therefore qualified as a career offender under the sentencing guidelines. U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a). Ellis contends that his three prior convictions—two for robbery and one for homicide solicitation—should have counted as a single conviction for purposes of the career-offender enhancement. But Ellis solicited a murder while in jail after his arrest for the armed robberies. His argument that no intervening arrest separated the offenses thus fails, as the guidelines define an “intervening arrest” as one in which “the defendant is arrested for the first offense prior to committing the - 10 - Case No. 14-1412 United States v. Ellis second offense.” U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(a)(2) (emphasis added). Given the intervening arrest, the district court correctly tallied Ellis’s convictions. See id. (“Prior sentences always are counted separately if the sentences were imposed for offenses that were separated by an intervening arrest . . . .”).