United States v. Coleman

• Decision Date: 31 August 2016
• Docket Number: Nos. 15-5844/5845,s. 15-5844/5845
• Citation: 835 F.3d 606
• Parties: United States of America, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. John Nathan Coleman, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

835 F.3d 606

United States of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.John Nathan Coleman, Defendant–Appellant.

Nos. 15-5844/5845

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: June 8, 2016

Decided and Filed: August 31, 2016

ARGUED: Kevin M. Schad, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Cincinnati, Ohio, for Appellant. Daniel E. Hancock, United States Attorney's Office, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Kevin M. Schad, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Cincinnati, Ohio, for Appellant. Charles P. Wisdom, Jr., United States Attorney's Office, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellee.

Before: BOGGS, CLAY, and GILMAN, Circuit Judges.

BOGGS

, J., delivered the opinion of the court in which GILMAN, J., joined. CLAY, J. (pp. 618 – 23), delivered a separate dissenting opinion.

OPINION

BOGGS

, Circuit Judge.

In 2015, John Nathan Coleman used marijuana and cocaine while serving a term of supervised release from federal prison. After Coleman admitted his offense to a probation officer, the government moved to revoke his supervised release. In response to Coleman's dissatisfaction with his court-appointed attorney, the district court appointed new defense counsel minutes before holding a revocation hearing in Coleman's case. The district court proceeded to find that Coleman had violated the terms of his supervised release and imposed an above-Guidelines sentence of thirty months of imprisonment. Coleman appeals the revocation of his supervised release, arguing that he was constructively denied the assistance of counsel due to the brief amount of time between the appointment of new counsel and his revocation hearing. Coleman also argues that his sentence is procedurally unreasonable. For the reasons given below, we affirm.

I

In October 2007, Coleman sold three grams of crack cocaine to an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”). DEA agents subsequently arrested Coleman after he helped the informant to arrange a second cocaine transaction. Coleman ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute five grams or more of crack cocaine, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1)

, 846. The district court sentenced Coleman to ninety-two months of imprisonment and four years of supervised release and recommended that Coleman undergo substance-abuse treatment.

Six months before Coleman's sentence was set to expire, the Bureau of Prisons granted Coleman's application for a furlough transfer to a Lexington, Kentucky, establishment run by a charity, where he was to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Two months later, Coleman escaped from the establishment and did not return. The United States Marshal Service ultimately found Coleman in a Lexington neighborhood, and Coleman subsequently pleaded guilty to escape from federal custody, a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 751(a)

. Judge Joseph Hood, who was assigned Coleman's new case, sentenced Coleman to fifteen months of imprisonment, to be followed by three years of supervised release that would run concurrently with his unfinished four-year supervised-release term.

Coleman completed his prison sentences on September 19, 2014, and began serving his two concurrent terms of supervised release. But less than two months later, Coleman admitted to having violated the conditions of his supervised release by using cocaine. Judge Hood ordered that Coleman serve an additional six-month term of imprisonment, to be followed by ninety days of in-patient substance-abuse treatment and the remainder of his supervised-release term.

After finishing the court-ordered substance-abuse treatment on June 30, 2015, Coleman was released from the treatment facility on several conditions, including that he refrain from using controlled substances without a prescription and abstain from committing any state or federal offenses. But two days later, in a routine interview with his probation officer, Coleman admitted that he had recently smoked marijuana. The following week, after a urine sample that Coleman provided tested positive for cocaine, the government petitioned the court to revoke Coleman's supervised-release term for violating the conditions that he not use controlled substances or engage in criminal activity.

On July 9, a magistrate judge appointed local attorney Derek Gordon to represent Coleman and scheduled a revocation hearing for August 4 before Judge Hood, who, as mentioned above, had already presided over Coleman's escape conviction and sentencing, as well as his first revocation hearing. But eight days later, Coleman filed a pro se motion for new counsel, in which he expressed that he was dissatisfied with Gordon's work. In his motion, Coleman also admitted to taking “2 hits off of a [marijuana] joint” and asked the district court for leniency in sentencing, explaining that he had played only a minor role in the 2007 drug conspiracy and that he wanted to resume “a normal life” with his wife and child.

Judge Hood convened a hearing on Coleman's motion on July 27 at 10:05 a.m. The district court first asked Gordon and Coleman about the latter's motion for new counsel. When Coleman confirmed that he wanted to discontinue his relationship with Gordon, the district court granted Coleman's request and relieved Gordon. The court then appointed attorney Robert Abell, who was already present at the hearing on the court's request, as Gordon's replacement. Upon confirming that Abell had copies of Coleman's presentence and violation reports, the court called for a recess in order to give Abell time to review the documents with Coleman.

The court went back on the record at 10:19 a.m., fourteen minutes after the hearing first started. Abell informed the court that Coleman would not be contesting the marijuana and cocaine-related charges mentioned in the violation reports and remarked that “[i]t's my understanding the court has a final hearing next Tuesday.” The court asked whether the parties wished to hold that final hearing as scheduled during the following week, or if they preferred to “just go ahead and have it today.” Coleman spoke up and volunteered that he “wanted to get it out of the way,” and Abell confirmed that “Mr. Coleman is ready to go forward today and get this matter completed.” In accordance with Coleman's request, the court treated the remainder of the hearing as a revocation hearing.

The district court began by noting that the presentence report identified the Guidelines imprisonment range for Coleman's offense as twenty-one to twenty-seven months. The court then asked whether Abell wished to “speak on behalf of Coleman.” Abell responded:

Judge, I guess the record indicates at worst that Mr. Coleman has an ongoing substance abuse problem that he's struggled with significantly, and certainly the court has familiarity with his history and I am sure will take that into consideration when determining what action is appropriate today.

The court then asked whether Coleman wished to make a statement. Coleman, speaking on his own behalf, admitted to the court that he was “wrong” to have used illegal drugs while on supervised release, but then proceeded to discuss his substance-abuse problem and complain about the inadequacy of the treatment that he received in the residential treatment facility. In response, the court observed that Coleman had repeatedly violated the terms of his supervised release:

[W]hen you do ... dope, that's a violation, and that's—that just seems to be a recurring problem with you.... [A]pparently you don't seem to appreciate the fact that when we say do not use illegal substances, that means you don't use it, regardless of whether you ... get home and you don't have a drug program immediately available for you....

The court also admonished Coleman for his attempt to blame his violations on the treatment facility's failures:

I understand that [the residential program] didn't have what you wanted them to have or [what] they said they were supposed to have. But then you got ... out and you did it. You did dope. The problem is you are not supposed to be doing dope.... Period. Not at all.... I don't think it is helping you at all to be involved [in treatment], and it's not helping us. We are spending money ... [and] to be helped, you have got to want to be helped.

The court concluded that “you do have a weakness, and I'm sorry for that; but we have tried to do what we could to help you with that weakness, and we haven't been very successful.”

The court then revoked Coleman's supervised release and sentenced him to thirty months of imprisonment—three months above the upper end of the applicable Guidelines range—with no further supervised release. The court concluded by asking Coleman, his counsel, and the prosecutor if they had any objections to the imposed sentence. Each responded in the negative.

Coleman timely filed a notice of appeal. On appeal, Coleman argues that he was constructively denied the assistance of counsel during his revocation hearing. He also argues that the district court's sentence was procedurally unreasonable because the district court failed to consider relevant sentencing factors and did not provide reasons for imposing an above-Guidelines sentence. We address each of Coleman's arguments in turn.

II

We begin with Coleman's claim that he was constructively denied the assistance of counsel at his revocation hearing on the ground that Abell had insufficient time in which to prepare a defense. Claims of ineffective assistance of counsel present mixed questions of law and fact that we review de novo. United States v. Ferguson , 669 F.3d 756, 761 (6th Cir. 2012)

. However, we generally review such claims on collateral review because the record on direct appeal “is [often] insufficient to assess the merits of the claim.” United States v. Smith , 600 Fed.Appx. 991, 993 (6th Cir. 2015) ; see also

Massaro v. United States , 538 U.S. 500, 504–05, 123 S.Ct. 1690, 155 L.Ed.2d 714 (2003). Only in the rare case that would not benefit from further record...