Opinion ID: 4191525
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Alleged Sentencing Disparity Error

Text: At his sentencing hearing, Defendant also argued that he should receive a belowGuidelines sentence to avoid creating a wide disparity between his sentence (more than seventy years) and Benson’s sentence (seventeen years following a guilty plea). See 18 U.S.C. 3553(a)(6). In rejecting this argument, the district court stated: Regarding sentence disparities, that was raised by Mr. Mitchell. Disparity you look at on a national basis, not an individual basis for a particular case. And if people follow the statute, there would be very little disparity for the same crimes. (R. 136, PageID #741.) Defendant argues that a district court may consider individual sentence disparities between co-defendants in addition to the need to avoid creating disparities between 20 No. 16-2063 similarly situated defendants nationwide, and that therefore the district court procedurally erred by failing to consider the disparity between Defendant’s and Benson’s sentences. Defendant is incorrect. As an initial matter, the district court was correct that 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6) “is concerned with national disparities among the many defendants with similar criminal backgrounds convicted of similar conduct.” United States v. Simmons, 501 F.3d 620, 623 (6th Cir. 2007) (collecting cases). “It is not concerned with disparities between one individual’s sentence and another individual’s sentence, despite the fact that the two are codefendants.” Id. While a district judge “may exercise his or her discretion and determine a defendant’s sentence in light of a co-defendant’s sentence . . . the district court is not required to consider that type of disparity under § 3553(a)(6).” Id. at 624. In other words, the district court correctly stated the law, and its decision not to grant Defendant a downward variance in light of Benson’s sentence was well within its discretion. Moreover, given that the district court heard extensive testimony that Defendant was the “mastermind” behind the burglaries, it was not unreasonable for the district court to conclude that Defendant’s conduct was more culpable than Benson’s. We therefore find no abuse of discretion on this argument as well. iii. Failure to Group Counts Pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 3D1.2 Defendant next argues that the district court committed two related errors in calculating Defendant’s Guidelines range. Because both of these alleged errors relate to how Defendant’s robbery and conspiracy convictions were grouped in calculating his total offense level, we will briefly describe the grouping calculation that the district court performed. Under the Guidelines, when “a defendant has been convicted of more than one count,” the court must: (i) place each offense into a “group,” whereby closely related counts are grouped together for sentencing purposes; (ii) then determine the offense level applicable to each group “by applying the rules specified in [USSG] § 3D1.3;” and finally (iii) determine the “combined offense level” for all of the groups taken together “by applying the rules specified in [USSG] § 3D1.4.” USSG § 3D1.1(a)(1)–(3). In performing the “grouping” at step one, the Guidelines 21 No. 16-2063 specify that a “conviction on a count charging a conspiracy to commit more than one offense shall be treated as if the defendant had been convicted on a separate count of conspiracy for each offense that the defendant conspired to commit.” USSG § 1B1.2(d). Offenses may then be grouped if: (i) the “counts involve the same victim and the same act or transaction;” (ii) the “counts involve the same victim and two or more acts or transactions connected by a common criminal objective or constituting part of a common scheme or plan;” (iii) when “one of the counts embodies conduct that is treated as a specific offense characteristic in, or other adjustment to, the guideline applicable to another of the counts;” or (iv) when “the offense level is determined largely on the basis of the total amount of harm or loss, the quantity of a substance involved, or some other measure of aggregate harm, or if the offense behavior is ongoing or continuous in nature and the offense guideline is written to cover such behavior.” USSG § 3D1.2(a)–(d). In this case, Defendant was charged with aiding and abetting the May 29, 2014, July 29, 2014, and January 8, 2015 robberies, and conspiring to commit both those robberies and the three aborted robberies on October 7, 2014, February 18, 2015, and February 27, 2015. Pursuant to § 1B1.2(d), the conspiracy count divided into six constituent conspiracies—as if the jury had convicted Defendant of separate counts of conspiring to commit each successful and aborted robbery. Section 3D1.2(a) then called on the district court to group each constituent conspiracy to commit a successful robbery with the corresponding charge of aiding and abetting—because they “involve[d] the same victim and the same act or transgression.” This left six offense groups: the pairings for each successful robbery and the constituent conspiracies for each aborted robbery.4 The district court then calculated the aggregate offense level based on these groupings. 4 Curiously, the presentence investigation report (“PSR”) prepared by the probation department effectively found that there were seven offenses to group: in addition to the May 29, 2014, July 29, 2014, and January 8, 2015 robberies, and the aborted robberies on October 7, 2014, February 18, 2015, and February 27, 2015, the PSR also treated Count 1 of the indictment (conspiracy to commit bank robbery) as a separate offense to be grouped. This was erroneous; under § 1B1.2(d), the district court was required to separate Count 1 into its constituent 22 No. 16-2063 Defendant argues that the above-referenced grouping procedure was improper for two reasons.5 First, Defendant argues that the three unconsummated robberies—which were listed as overt acts in furtherance of Defendant’s conspiracy to commit bank robbery in Count 1 of the indictment—should not have been grouped separately, because the verdict form submitted to the jury did not require a special finding that each of the charged overt acts actually occurred. In other words, Defendant argues that he cannot be sentenced on the aborted robberies because the jury was not asked to find that he individually participated in each unsuccessful robbery attempt. However, the logic of our precedents refutes this argument. In United States v. Ford, we held that “robberies may be counted as object offenses of a conspiracy” for Guidelines grouping purposes even “when the conspiracy count under which [the] defendant was convicted does not enumerate or list the robberies.” 761 F.3d 641, 659–60 (6th Cir. 2014). We reasoned that because Application Note 4 in § 1B1.2 “specifically addresses situations where ‘the verdict . . . does not establish which offense(s) was the object of the conspiracy,’ if the [Guidelines] ‘required that the object of a conspiracy be specifically named in the conspiracy count of an indictment, it would be difficult to imagine the reason for this comment’s existence.’” Id. at 660 (quoting United States v. Robles, 562 F.3d 451, 455 (2d Cir. 2009)); see also USSG § 1B1.2 note 4 (“Particular care must be taken in applying subsection (d) because there are cases in which the verdict or plea does not establish which offense(s) was the object of the conspiracy. In such cases, subsection (d) should only be applied with respect to an object offense alleged in the conspiracy count if the court, were it sitting as a trier of fact, would convict the defendant of conspiring to commit that object offense.”). The same reasoning is equally applicable here. conspiracies, and leave Count 1 itself out of the grouping analysis. However, the district court ultimately accepted the PSR’s recommendation to group Count 1 with Count 2 (the May 29, 2014 robbery), leaving the district court with six groups corresponding to the three successful and three aborted robberies. This was the correct grouping arrangement required by the Guidelines. Since neither party has raised the error, and the district court arrived at the correct groups anyway, we will not discuss the matter further. 5 Because Defendant made neither of these arguments before the district court, we review them for plain error. Vonner, 516 F.3d at 386. 23 No. 16-2063 Application Note 4 specifically envisions the scenario at issue in this case, where the district court is asked to sentence a defendant in part based on objects of a conspiracy that were not specifically found by a jury, and instructs district courts to include the alleged offense only if the district judge is convinced that the offense occurred. The clear implication of this note is that the lack of a special jury verdict finding that each of the objects of the conspiracy actually occurred does not prevent a defendant from being sentenced based on those objects. Defendant’s second argument is that the three successful robberies should have been grouped together for sentencing purposes. However, those three robberies were not groupable under any of the four criteria listed in § 3D1.2, and Defendant has put forward no argument to the contrary. We therefore hold that the district court did not err in grouping the successful robberies separately. iv. Alleged Improper Stacking Defendant also argues that he should not have received fifty years’ worth of mandatory sentencing enhancements under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(C)(i), because his second and third brandishing convictions were not “second or subsequent” convictions within the meaning of that statute. Defendant acknowledges that the Supreme Court rejected this precise argument in Deal v. United States, 508 U.S. 129, 130–137 (1993), but raises the argument in order to preserve it for a petition for certiorari. Certainly, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of § 924(c)(1)(C)(i) routinely produces strikingly long prison sentences, and there are perhaps good reasons to believe that Congress did not intend this result. See Deal, 508 U.S. at 138 (Stevens, J., dissenting). Nevertheless, we are bound to follow Deal unless and until the Supreme Court overrules it. We therefore reject this argument as well. 24 No. 16-2063