Court Opinion

ID: 9409522
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-07-18 16:00:59.668489+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:51.087824
License: Public Domain

USCA11 Case: 21-12542    Document: 56-1     Date Filed: 07/18/2023   Page: 1 of 9

                                                  [DO NOT PUBLISH]
                                   In the
                United States Court of Appeals
                         For the Eleventh Circuit

                          ____________________

                                 No. 21-12542
                           Non-Argument Calendar
                          ____________________

       UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
                                                      Plaintiﬀ-Appellee,
       versus
       TERRELL WILLIAMS,
       a.k.a. Terral Williams,

                                                  Defendant-Appellant.

                          ____________________

                 Appeal from the United States District Court
                       for the Middle District of Florida
                  D.C. Docket No. 3:05-cr-00100-TJC-MCR-1
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       2                         Opinion of the Court                     21-12542

                              ____________________

       Before NEWSOM, GRANT, and EDMONDSON, Circuit Judges.
       PER CURIAM:
              Terrell Williams appeals the 36-month sentence imposed --
       pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3) -- upon the second revocation of
       his supervised release.1 Williams ﬁrst contends that his post-revo-
       cation sentence was imposed in violation of his Fifth and Sixth
       Amendment rights. Williams also challenges the substantive rea-
       sonableness of his sentence. No reversible error has been shown;
       we aﬃrm.
              In 2005, Williams pleaded guilty to making a materially false
       statement to a federally-insured ﬁnancial institution, in violation of
       18 U.S.C. § 1014. Williams was sentenced to 42 months’ imprison-
       ment followed by 5 years’ supervised release. 2
                     After his release from prison, Williams violated the
       terms of his supervised release by engaging in new criminal con-
       duct. In March 2016, the district court revoked Williams’s super-
       vised release and sentenced Williams to 27 months in prison fol-
       lowed by 33 months of supervised release.

       1 Williams does not challenge the revocation of his supervised release.
       2 Because Williams committed the 2005 offense while on supervised release
       for two other federal convictions, the sentencing court ordered Williams’s 42-
       month sentence to be served consecutively to the sentences imposed upon the
       revocation of supervised release in those cases.
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       21-12542               Opinion of the Court                          3

               Williams began his second term of supervised release in No-
       vember 2017. In October 2019, a probation oﬃcer petitioned the
       district court to revoke Williams’s supervised release for a second
       time. At the ﬁnal revocation hearing, Williams admitted guilt to
       three of the six charged supervised-release violations in exchange
       for the government’s dismissal of the remaining charges. Williams
       admitted to (1) engaging in new criminal conduct by contributing
       to the delinquency of a minor; (2) failing to notify his probation
       oﬃcer before changing his residence (a charge based on Williams’s
       absconding from supervision for ten months); and (3) failing to no-
       tify his probation oﬃcer within 72 hours after being questioned by
       police.
              After determining that Williams’s admission was made
       knowingly and voluntarily, the district court revoked Williams’s su-
       pervised release. The district court then considered the parties’
       submissions, the advisory guidelines range (8 to 14 months), and
       the 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) factors. The court concluded that a sentence
       of 36 months’ imprisonment with no additional term of supervised
       release was appropriate.
                                             I.
             We ﬁrst address Williams’s argument challenging the consti-
       tutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3). We review de novo arguments
       about a statute’s constitutionality. See United States v. R. Scott Cun-
       ningham, 607 F.3d 1264, 1266 (11th Cir. 2010).
             Under section 3583(e)(3), a district court may revoke a term
       of supervised release if the court “ﬁnds by a preponderance of the
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       4                          Opinion of the Court                         21-12542

       evidence that the defendant violated a condition of supervised re-
       lease.” 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3). About reimprisonment, section
       3583(e)(3) provides that the district court may “require the defend-
       ant to serve in prison all or part of the term of supervised release
       authorized by statute for the oﬀense that resulted in such term of
       supervised release without credit for time previously served on
       post[-]release supervision” except that a defendant “may not be re-
       quired to serve on any such revocation . . . more than 3 years in prison
       if such oﬀense is a class B felony . . ..” Id. (emphasis added).
              Williams contends that section 3583(e)(3) impermissibly al-
       lows for an increased statutory penalty based on judge-found facts,
       in violation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the Supreme
       Court’s decision in Apprendi. 3 Williams’s argument is without
       merit.
              We have already upheld section 3583(e)(3) as constitutional
       under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments as those rights have been
       interpreted by Apprendi and its progeny. See R. Scott Cunningham,
       607 F.3d at 1268 (concluding that “§ 3583(e)(3) does not violate the
       Fifth or Sixth Amendments because the violation of supervised re-
       lease need only be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, and
       there is no right to trial by jury in a supervised release revocation

       3 Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 490 (2000) (“Other than the fact of a prior
       conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the pre-
       scribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond
       a reasonable doubt.”).
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       21-12542                  Opinion of the Court                               5

       hearing”).4 In reaching that decision, we explained that -- unlike
       the criminal defendant in Apprendi -- a defendant in a supervised-
       release revocation proceeding “stands already convicted” of the un-
       derlying criminal oﬀense and “was granted only conditional lib-
       erty” dependent upon the defendant’s compliance with the condi-
       tions of supervised release. Id.
              Williams has also failed to demonstrate that section
       3583(e)(3) is unconstitutional as applied to him. As an initial mat-
       ter, Williams admitted under oath (and has never disputed) that he
       violated the terms of his supervised release. His sentence, thus, is
       not based upon “judge-made facts.”
               Nor has Williams shown that his post-revocation sentence
       exceeded the statutory maximum penalty for his oﬀense. Williams
       was sentenced to a total of 105 months in prison (including his ini-
       tial 42-month sentence and his two post-revocation sentences of 27
       months and 36 months): a sentence that is well-below the statutory
       maximum penalty of 30 years for his oﬀense of conviction. See 18
       U.S.C. § 1014 (providing a statutory maximum sentence of 30 years
       for making a materially false statement to a federally-insured ﬁnan-
       cial institution).

       4 Contrary to Williams’s assertion on appeal, our decision in R. Scott Cunning-
       ham was not abrogated by the Supreme Court’s plurality opinion in United
       States v. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. 2369 (2019). See United States v. Moore, 22 F.4th
       1258, 1267-69 (11th Cir. 2022) (concluding that R. Scott Cunningham remains
       binding precedent following Haymond).
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       6                          Opinion of the Court                       21-12542

              Williams makes two arguments in support of his position
       that he was sentenced above the statutory maximum penalty for
       his oﬀense. First, Williams asserts that the maximum term of ad-
       ditional imprisonment the district court could have imposed upon
       revocation was 33 months: the 60-month statutory maximum term
       of supervised release authorized for his underlying oﬀense,5 minus
       the 27-month prison sentence imposed after the ﬁrst revocation of
       supervised release. In making this argument, Williams seems to
       rely on language in section 3583(h). See 18 U.S.C. § 3583(h) (provid-
       ing that a term of supervised release imposed upon revocation
       “shall not exceed the term of supervised release authorized by stat-
       ute for the oﬀense that resulted in the original term of supervised
       release, less any term of imprisonment that was imposed upon rev-
       ocation of supervised release”). Section 3583(h), however, governs
       the length of a term of post-revocation supervised release, not a post-
       revocation term of imprisonment and, thus, is inapplicable here.
             Elsewhere in his appellate brief, Williams also contends that
       the maximum post-revocation sentence the district court could
       have imposed was nine months. According to Williams, section
       3583(e)(3) provides a maximum aregate 36-month term of post-
       revocation imprisonment for class B felonies. Because Williams al-
       ready served a 27-month post-revocation sentence, he says the

       5 See 18 U.S.C. §§ 3559(a)(2) (categorizing offenses with a maximum term of
       imprisonment of at least 25 years as class B felonies), 3583(b)(1) (providing for
       a maximum term of five years of supervised release for class B felonies).
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       21-12542               Opinion of the Court                          7

       district court could sentence him to no more than 9 months of ad-
       ditional prison time.
               This argument is foreclosed by our prior precedent. See
       United States v. John Cunningham, 800 F.3d 1290, 1293 (11th Cir.
       2015) (concluding that section 3583(e)(3)’s felony-class limits are
       not subject to aggregation; each time a defendant’s supervised re-
       lease is revoked, the “defendant may be sentenced to the felony
       class limits contained within § 3583(e)(3) without regard to impris-
       onment previously served for revocation of supervised release.”).
                                            II.
              We next address Williams’s challenge to the substantive rea-
       sonableness of his sentence. Williams argues chieﬂy that the dis-
       trict court gave undue weight to his criminal history and risk of
       recidivism and failed to consider adequately his individual history.
               We review a sentence imposed upon revocation of super-
       vised release for reasonableness in the light of the totality of the
       circumstances and the section 3553(a) factors. See United States v.
       Trailer, 827 F.3d 933, 935-36 (11th Cir. 2016). We evaluate the sub-
       stantive reasonableness of a sentence -- whether one inside or out-
       side the guidelines range -- under a deferential abuse-of-discretion
       standard. See Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 41 (2007). “The party
       challenging the sentence bears the burden of showing that it is un-
       reasonable.” Trailer, 827 F.3d at 936.
              In imposing a sentence upon revocation of supervised re-
       lease, the district court must consider (1) the nature and circum-
       stances of the oﬀense, (2) the defendant’s history and
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       8                      Opinion of the Court                 21-12542

       characteristics, (3) the need for the sentence to deter criminal con-
       duct and to protect the public, (4) the need to provide the defendant
       with educational training or medical care, (5) the advisory guide-
       lines range, (6) the policy statements of the Sentencing Commis-
       sion, (7) the need to avoid sentencing disparities, and (8) the need
       to provide restitution to victims. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 3553(a), 3583(e).
       We will disturb a sentence only “if we are left with the deﬁnite and
       ﬁrm conviction that the district court committed a clear error of
       judgment in weighing the [sentencing] factors by arriving at a sen-
       tence that lies outside the range of reasonable sentences dictated
       by the facts of the case.” See Trailer, 827 F.3d at 936 (quotation
       omitted).
               Williams has failed to demonstrate that his above-guidelines
       sentence substantively was unreasonable. The record reﬂects that
       Williams has a lengthy criminal history, including a history of vio-
       lating the terms of his supervised release. Williams committed the
       underlying oﬀense in 2005 while on supervised release in two un-
       related cases. And Williams committed the instant supervised-re-
       lease violations after already serving an additional 27-month sen-
       tence upon the revocation of his ﬁrst term of supervised release in
       this case.
               The district court rejected Williams’s characterization of his
       supervised-release violations as being merely “technical.” The dis-
       trict court found, instead, that the conduct underlying Williams’s
       violations -- absconding from supervision for 10 months and
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       21-12542                Opinion of the Court                          9

       staying in a hotel room with a runaway 13- or 14-year-old girl --
       were “serious” matters.
               In the light of the nature and circumstances of Williams’s
       supervised-release violations and of Williams’s history and charac-
       teristics, we accept that an above-guidelines sentence of 36 months’
       imprisonment could be reasonably thought to be necessary to pro-
       vide just punishment, to provide adequate deterrence, to promote
       respect for the law, and to protect the public from future crimes.
              Contrary to Williams’s assertion on appeal, the district court
       considered expressly evidence that Williams had completed college
       courses and had become addicted to pain killers following a work-
       related accident. That the district court aﬀorded more weight to
       Williams’s criminal history that the court did to other mitigating
       factors is no abuse of discretion. Cf. United States v. Amedeo, 487 F.3d
       823, 832 (11th Cir. 2007) (“The weight to be accorded any given
       § 3553(a) factor is a matter committed to the sound discretion of
       the district court, and we will not substitute our judgment in
       weighing the relevant factors.” (quotations and alteration omit-
       ted)).
               Viewing the record as a whole, we are not “left with the def-
       inite and ﬁrm conviction that the district court committed a clear
       error of judgment in weighing the § 3553(a) factors by arriving at
       a sentence that lies outside the range of reasonable sentences dic-
       tated by the facts of the case.” See Trailer, 827 F.3d at 936. The dis-
       trict court abused no discretion; we aﬃrm Williams’s sentence.
              AFFIRMED.