Opinion ID: 4392
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Remand Under Re g alad o

Text: Defendant argues that remand is required for the District Court to resentence defendant under Regalado, 518 F.3d 143. In Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85, 91 (2007), the Supreme Court held that a sentencing judge, in exercising his or her discretion to vary from the United States Sentencing Guidelines under United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), “may consider the disparity between the Guidelines’ treatment of crack and powder cocaine offenses.” Prior to Kimbrough, however, “this Circuit tended to discourage district courts from deviating from the crack cocaine Guidelines,” and thus “when a district court sentenced a defendant for a crack cocaine offense before Kimbrough, there was an unacceptable likelihood of error.” Regalado, 518 F.3d at 147. In Regalado, therefore, we adopted the remand procedure of United States v. Crosby, 397 F.3d 103 (2d Cir. 2005), and held as follows: Where a defendant has not preserved the argument that the sentencing range for the crack cocaine offense fails to serve the objectives of sentencing under § 3553(a), we will remand to give the district court an opportunity to indicate whether it would have imposed a non-Guidelines sentence knowing that it had discretion to deviate from the Guidelines to serve those objectives. If so, the court should vacate the original sentence and resentence the defendant. If not, the court should state on the record that it is declining to resentence, and it should provide an appropriate explanation for this decision. On appeal, if we have not already done so, we will review the sentence for reasonableness. 3 Regalado, 518 F.3d at 149. Such a remand is required unless “the record . . . unambiguously demonstrate[s] that the District Court was aware of its discretion to consider that the disparity between cocaine base and cocaine powder offenses in the United States Sentencing Guidelines might result in a sentence greater than necessary.” United States v. Keller, 539 F.3d 97, 98 (2d Cir. 2008) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). Here, however, defendant was sentenced for offenses relating to heroin, not crack cocaine, and defendant points to no authority holding that Regalado should be applied outside the context of the crack cocaine Guidelines. Even assuming, without deciding, that a Regalado remand might be appropriate outside the context of the crack cocaine Guidelines, defendant has provided no indication of how he would argue, on remand, that the heroin Guidelines in this case “fail[] to serve the objectives of sentencing under § 3553(a).” Regalado, 518 F.3d at 149. Indeed, in contrast to a Regalado remand, where a defendant would urge the district court to adopt a “disagreement with the policy underlying the crack-powder disparity in the Guidelines,” Keller, 539 F.3d at 102, defendant has provided no account of what kind of “disagreement with . . . policy” he would urge the District Court to adopt on remand here. Accordingly, we reject defendant’s claim that remand is required under Regalado.