Federal Judiciary

United States v. Ramirez, No. 08-2771-cr (2d Cir. April 1, 2009) (found here)

It's no April Fools joke.  The Second Circuit denied a Government appeal based on procedural errors.  Here's how it went down.

The Government submitted that Ramirez's sentence was infected by procedural error -- the district court's "refusal" to calculate the Guidelines range based on the $500,000 in narcotics proceeds and five kilograms of cocaine that he'd delivered in his livery cab.  More specifically, in declining to calculate Ramirez's Guidelines range by reference to the amount of drugs or money transported, the district court explained that: (1) the trial evidence failed to indicate Ramirez's awareness of these quantities; and (2) it did not want to "disturb" the jury's specific finding that less than 500 grams of cocaine was the amount within the scope of criminal activity undertaken. 

This, says the Second Circuit, was procedural error because the "appropriate course [] would have been to calculate Ramirez's base offense level with the aid of U.S.S.G. § 1.3(a)(1)(A), which directs that a defendant's offense level must be calculated with reference to" all relevant conduct and which notes that "[w]ith respect to offenses involving contraband (including controlled substances), the defendant is accountable for all quantities of contraband with which he was involved," without regard to whether the quantities were either actually known or reasonably foreseeable to him.  Thus, the Second Circuit found that Ramirez's Guidelines calculation should have been made using at least 5.036 kilograms of cocaine as the relevant drug quantity.

Still, the Second Circuit didn't reverse the district court, nothwithstanding that the case represented a "significant procedural error that would generally require remand for resentencing."  Why?  Well, the Supreme Court has written that, in determining whether a remand is appropriate, a court must decide whether the district court would have imposed the same sentence had it not relied upon the invalid facotor or factors.  Williams v. United States, 503 U.S. 193, 203 (1992).  And a remand is not necessary if the reviewing court concludes, on the record as a whole, that the error was harmless -- to wit, that the error did not affect the district court's selection of the sentence imposed.  Id.

Here, the "district court made it clear that, in its view, a higher sentence would not be 'fair and just' . . . .  Thus, a remand for resentencing is unnecessary in this case as the record suggests that the district court would impose the same sentence on remand."