Court Opinion

ID: 9405260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-06-27 21:00:45.26084+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:20.384907
License: Public Domain

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                                            UNPUBLISHED

                               UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
                                   FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

                                              No. 18-4926

        UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

                            Plaintiff - Appellee,

                     v.

        CLYDE ALLEN WILLIAMS,

                            Defendant - Appellant.

        Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, at
        Anderson. Timothy M. Cain, District Judge. (8:17-cr-00843-TMC-1)

        Submitted: August 31, 2022                                        Decided: June 26, 2023

        Before GREGORY, Chief Judge, and KING and WYNN, Circuit Judges.

        Vacated and remanded by unpublished per curiam opinion.

        ON BRIEF: Kimberly H. Albro, Assistant Federal Public Defender, OFFICE OF THE
        FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Columbia, South Carolina, for Appellant. Corey F.
        Ellis, United States Attorney, Maxwell B. Cauthen, III, Assistant United States Attorney,
        OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Greenville, South Carolina, for
        Appellee.

        Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
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        PER CURIAM:

               Clyde Allen Williams appeals his sentence imposed following his guilty plea to

        possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon, in violation of 18 U.S.C.

        §§ 922(g)(1), 924(a)(2), (e).    The district court sentenced Williams to 100 months’

        imprisonment followed by 3 years of supervised release. On appeal, Williams asserts that

        (1) one of the discretionary conditions of supervised release in his written judgment is

        inconsistent with the court’s oral announcement of that condition at sentencing, in violation

        of United States v. Rogers, 961 F.3d 291 (4th Cir. 2020); (2) the court failed to orally

        pronounce all of the discretionary supervised release conditions that appear in the written

        judgment, also in violation of Rogers; and (3) his sentence is procedurally unreasonable.

        For the reasons that follow, we vacate Williams’ sentence and remand for resentencing.

               In Rogers, we held that a district court must announce all nonmandatory conditions

        of supervised release at the sentencing hearing. United States v. Singletary, 984 F.3d 341,

        344 (4th Cir. 2021) (citing Rogers, 961 F.3d at 295-99). “Discretionary conditions that

        appear for the first time in a subsequent written judgment . . . are nullities; the defendant

        has not been sentenced to those conditions, and a remand for resentencing is required.” Id.

        (citing Rogers, 961 F.3d at 295, 300-01).

               When, as here, “a defendant claims that a district court committed a Rogers error,

        we review the consistency of the defendant’s oral sentence and the written judgment de

        novo.” United States v. Cisson, 33 F.4th 185, 193 (4th Cir. 2022) (cleaned up). That is,

        we “compare[] the sentencing transcript with the written judgment to determine whether

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        an error occurred as a matter of law.” Rogers, 961 F.3d at 296 (internal quotation marks

        omitted).

               At the sentencing hearing, the district court announced a discretionary condition of

        supervised release concerning the probation office to which Williams must report upon his

        release from custody. We have reviewed the record and conclude that the court’s oral

        pronouncement “did not match the description of that condition in the written judgment.”

        Cisson, 33 F.4th at 191. Moreover, although the Government contends that the oral and

        written conditions are consistent despite their facial differences, Williams strongly contests

        the Government’s proffered explanation. Therefore, unlike in Cisson, where we upheld

        facially dissimilar supervised release conditions because the defendant did not contest the

        Government’s proffered explanation for why the conditions were consistent, id. at 194,

        here, we may not disregard the differences between the oral and written descriptions of the

        probation district to which Williams must report.

               “[W]here the description of a condition in an oral sentence d[oes] not match the

        description of that condition in the written judgment, that error alone is reversible Rogers

        error.” Id. at 191 (internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore vacate and remand for

        resentencing. Furthermore, because the sentence must be vacated in its entirety, we decline

        to address Williams’ remaining challenges to the district court’s oral announcement of his

        original sentence and the procedural reasonableness of that sentence. See Singletary, 984

        F.3d at 346-47 (declining to consider additional challenges to sentence where Rogers error

        necessitated vacatur and remand). We dispense with oral argument because the facts and

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        legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before this court and argument

        would not aid the decisional process.

                                                                   VACATED AND REMANDED

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