U.S. v. Adams, 96-1442
| Decision Date | 15 January 1997 |
| Docket Number | No. 96-1442,96-1442 |
| Citation | 104 F.3d 1028 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Charles W. ADAMS, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Ilenen A. Goodman, Assistant Federal Public Defender, argued, St. Louis, MO, for Appellant.
Michael A. Price, Assistant United States Attorney, Cape Girardeau, MO, argued (Edward L. Dowd, Jr., United States Attorney, on the brief), for Appellee.
Before McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge, HENLEY, Senior Circuit Judge, and MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.
Charles W. Adams appeals the denial of a motion made pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) to reduce his sentence because of an amendment to the federal sentencing guidelines applicable to his case. We reverse and remand for resentencing.
When federal drug enforcement agents entered property that Mr. Adams owned with his wife, they discovered one hundred and ten marijuana plants growing there. A seven-count indictment against Mr. Adams, his wife, and his son for the manufacture and possession of marijuana resulted. This indictment was subsequently dismissed, in accordance with the terms of a plea agreement, and the government filed informations charging Mr. Adams with the manufacture of seventy-three plants and his son with the manufacture of thirty-seven plants. Charges against Mrs. Adams were dismissed.
The plea agreement recited that the parties had stipulated "that the number of marijuana plants manufactured (cultivated) in this case, that are readily provable by the government as attributable to this defendant, Charles W. Adams, were seventy-three (73) marijuana plants." The agreement, however, acknowledged, as it had to, that "the sentencing judge is neither a party to nor bound by this agreement and is free to impose a sentence up to the maximum penalties as set forth elsewhere in the agreement." This is in accordance with U.S.S.G. § 6B1.4(a) and § 6B1.4(d), which provide, respectively, that while "[a] plea agreement may be accompanied by a written stipulation of facts relevant to sentencing," nevertheless "[t]he court is not bound by the stipulation, but may with the aid of the presentence report, determine the facts relevant to sentencing." The presentence report, however, stated simply that "pursuant to the plea agreement in this case, [the defendant] is accountable for 73 ... plants," and the district court sentenced Mr. Adams on that basis. Therefore, though the district court made no explicit finding of the number of marijuana plants in fixing a sentence for the defendant, it implicitly adopted the number to which the parties had stipulated. The court sentenced Mr. Adams to 30 months in prison, the minimum term in the range prescribed by the sentencing guidelines at the time.
Subsequent to Mr. Adams's sentencing, amendment 516 to § 2D1.1(c) of the sentencing guidelines was passed. This amendment, which is made retroactive by virtue of U.S.S.G. § 1B1.10(c), and which gives a court the authority to modify a sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2), see U.S.S.G. § 1B1.10(a), changed the weight equivalence of a marijuana plant for sentencing purposes from one kilogram to one hundred grams. Mr. Adams filed two motions urging the court to reconsider his sentence in light of the amendment. The court, asserting in part that "[h]ad the defendant been held accountable for the entire 110 marijuana plants, the statutorily required minimum term of imprisonment would have been five years," denied both motions.
Mr. Adams's appeal appears to us to reduce to an argument that the district court considered some things that it should not have and did not consider other things that it should have, when it denied his motion to have his sentence reduced. We find no merit in the second proposition, but find sufficient merit in the first to remand for resentencing.
We start with the question of what part the one hundred and ten plants played in the court's decision to deny Mr. Adams's motion. Mr. Adams believes that in deciding whether to apply the relevant amendment retroactively, the district court revisited its earlier determination that he was responsible for only seventy-three plants. Mr. Adams believes that this was error for a number of reasons, but before we consider them, we are obliged to determine whether the district court did indeed regard the deal that Mr. Adams had made with the government with respect to the number of plants relevant to the matter of resentencing.
While the matter is not entirely free from doubt, we believe that Mr. Adams is correct in concluding that the district court weighed the fact that the charges against him had been reduced in determining whether to apply the amended sentencing guideline to him. The court stated that "[h]ad the defendant been held accountable for the entire one hundred ten marijuana plants, the statutorily required minimum term of imprisonment would have been five years pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B)." The court then observed that as "a result of the plea agreement, no minimum term resulted and the guideline imprisonment range was reduced." The court also stated that Mr. Adams "received adequate consideration in his plea bargaining which the court approved." It seems apparent to us that the court was indicating that Mr. Adams might well in fact have been responsible for more than seventy-three plants and that he had gotten a break when the charges were reduced.
Mr. Adams maintains that this was error, first of all, because revisiting its earlier determination of the amount of marijuana that he was manufacturing runs afoul of the sentencing guidelines' injunction that in deciding whether to apply an amendment retroactively the district court "shall substitute only the amendment[ ] ... for the corresponding guideline provision[ ] that [was] applied when the defendant was sentenced," leaving "[a]ll other guideline application decisions ... unaffected." See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.10, application note 2. Mr. Adams argues that these provisions have...
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