U.S. v. Bryant

• Decision Date: 26 May 2011
• Docket Number: No. 09–2500.,09–2500.
• Citation: 643 F.3d 28
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee,v.Chris BRYANT, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

643 F.3d 28

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee,

v.Chris BRYANT, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 09–2500.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard March 9, 2011.Decided May 26, 2011.

William W. Fick, Federal Public Defender Office, for appellant.Randall E. Kromm, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Carmen M. Ortiz, United States Attorney, was on brief for appellee.Before BOUDIN, Circuit Judge, SOUTER,^* Associate Justice, and SELYA, Circuit Judge.

BOUDIN, Circuit Judge.

This case concerning sentencing is back before this court for the second time; the prior history is recounted in our decision on defendant Chris Bryant's first appeal, United States v. Bryant, 571 F.3d 147 (1st Cir.2009). To summarize briefly, in 2006, Bryant participated in two sales of crack cocaine to an undercover officer in Boston, Massachusetts. He was indicted in February 2007 for the second transaction and pled guilty in September to one count of distribution of cocaine base. 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) (2006).

At issue in his sentencing was whether he qualified as a career offender under the sentencing guidelines, which provide:

A defendant is a career offender if (1) the defendant was at least eighteen years old at the time the defendant committed the instant offense of conviction; (2) the instant offense of conviction is a felony that is either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense; and (3) the defendant has at least two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense.

U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a) (2007). Bryant was thirty-five at the time he committed the instant offense, which was a drug felony; the dispute at sentencing was whether he had two prior drug felonies that counted as the requisite career offender predicates.

The draft presentence report (“PSR”) did not treat Bryant as a career offender; as a career offender predicate, it listed only a 1996 New York conviction for attempted sale of a controlled substance. Both parties objected: the government said that the PSR had omitted a 1997 Massachusetts conviction for conspiracy to violate state drug laws; Bryant objected both to the listing of the New York conviction, claiming that the government lacked documentation required by Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13, 125 S.Ct. 1254, 161 L.Ed.2d 205 (2005), and (on several grounds) to the listing of the Massachusetts conviction.

The probation officer then revised the PSR, accepting the government's objection but not Bryant's objections to the predicates and concluding that Bryant was a career offender. This designation increased the guidelines sentencing range from 18–24 months to 151–188 months. At the sentencing hearing, Bryant renewed his objections but the district court sided with the government. Pointing to mitigating factors, the district court sentenced Bryant to ninety months' imprisonment.

Bryant appealed, and, in our 2009 decision, this court held that the Massachusetts conviction did qualify as a predicate for career offender purposes. Bryant, 571 F.3d at 156, 158–59. As for the New York conviction, we agreed with the district court that the New York drug offense if proven would qualify as a career offender predicate under the guidelines, id. at 156–58; but the government had been unable to produce a judicial record of the fact of Bryant's New York conviction, relying instead on other evidence that the district court had accepted without determining whether it was sufficiently reliable, id. at 153–56.¹ We ruled:

[The Massachusetts] conviction and the New York conviction, if proven, qualify as predicate offenses for career offender purposes. However, we hold that the district court committed clear error in finding that the government met its burden to establish the existence of the prior New York conviction. We therefore vacate Bryant's sentence and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Id. at 161.

As for the remand, we left “it to the district court to decide how best to determine the reliability of the sources the government used to prove the fact of the New York conviction.” Bryant, 571 F.3d at 156 n. 6. On remand, the government submitted three new documents to support its claim that Bryant had been convicted of the New York drug offense in question, specifically:

a Certificate of Disposition Indictment, prepared by a New York court clerk in 2009 based on a review of the court's electronic records;

a Sentence and Commitment Form, prepared by the New York court in 1996 and obtained from the correctional facility where Bryant was held; and

a Certificate of Incarceration, prepared by the New York Department of Correctional Services in 2009.

The government also submitted for the first time an affidavit from the records coordinator at the correctional facility stating that the Sentence and Commitment Form was received in the regular course of business and that she had never known the last two documents to be inaccurate.

The resentencing hearing took place in October 2009. A few days before the hearing, Bryant's counsel learned that transportation from prison had not been arranged and that Bryant would not be able to appear. Bryant's counsel tried to contact him, but Bryant could not be reached and was not brought to the hearing. At the hearing, Bryant's counsel stated that he was not in a position to waive any right Bryant might have involving his presence at the hearing.

The district court ruled that the defendant was not required to be present since the court was not considering a higher sentence than originally imposed. ² Bryant's counsel argued that the new records were impermissible, that without them there was insufficient proof, and that in any event a lower sentence should be imposed based on post-sentencing rehabilitation. Thereafter, the district court reaffirmed Bryant's career offender status and reimposed the original ninety-month sentence. Bryant again appeals.

The target of this appeal is the district court's conducting of the new sentencing hearing in Bryant's absence. The government says in a footnote that Bryant has forfeited the objection even though Bryant's counsel made clear at the hearing that he was not waiving Bryant's rights; the government's theory is that after the hearing, when the district court reserved decision, Bryant should in the interval have made a motion for a new hearing, at which he could have been present.

The district judge had told Bryant's counsel at the hearing when the “presence” objection was raised: “I understand. You're not waiving your client's right.” When a party has asserted a position and the district judge has unambiguously rejected it, the party is not required to renew the request to preserve the claim for appeal. United States v. Caro–Muñiz, 406 F.3d 22, 28–29 (1st Cir.2005). Perhaps one could argue that Bryant's counsel did not expressly insist on his client's presence; but this is not the government's argument and to boot is not very persuasive.

On the merits of the right-to-be-present claim, it is settled that the defendant himself has a right to be present at both his trial and his sentencing; there are constitutional bases for this right, as well as common-law precedent, and it is reflected in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.³ The defendant is also entitled to a right “to allocute”—to make a personal plea and to provide information favorable to his position ⁴—although under some precedent presence is a right in some sentencing proceedings where allocution is not required.

A resentencing, assuming that the full range of ordinary sentencing issues is open, is treated essentially the same as an initial sentencing for purposes of the presence requirement. Thompson v. United States, 495 F.2d 1304, 1307 (1st Cir.1974); see also Fed.R.Crim.P. 43 advisory committee's note (1998 Amendments). But often a resentencing may be quite a different animal, depending on the basis for and nature of the resentencing and (in particular) any limitations that may have been placed on the scope of the resentencing by an appellate court that remanded the original sentence for further proceedings.

Any alteration of the original judgment imposing the sentence could be called a “resentencing”—the word has no definitive meaning—but whether the defendant's presence and an opportunity to allocute are required has in practice turned on whether requiring these safeguards made sense in the context of the proceedings. Even in an initial sentencing, portions of the proceeding—say, a hearing on a strictly legal issue—may not require the defendant's presence. Fed.R.Crim.P. 43(b)(3)–(4) (listing exceptions to the presence requirement).

Resentencings are various in kind and many are very narrow. At one extreme, the resentencing ordered may be as unconstrained and open-ended as an initial sentencing; but at the other extreme, a remand may be so focused and limited that it involves merely a technical revision of the sentence dictated by the appeals court and calls for no formal proceeding—say, modifying the judgment to cut back to its legally permitted length a supervised release term that exceeded what the statute permits.

Thus, the government has had no difficulty citing to us a number of our own cases where we have deemed the defendant's presence at resentencing to be unnecessary,⁵ and there are other such decisions not cited by the government. Most of these can easily be distinguished from this case, but they underscore the fact that “resentencing” is not a unitary phenomenon. The federal criminal rules themselves identify certain classes of resentencing proceedings that categorically do not require the defendant's presence. Fed.R.Crim.P. 43(b)(3)–(4).

So, whether a court is considering a defendant's “right to be present” or a government claim of “harmless error” where such a right was disallowed, one should start by asking just what was open to the district court on remand. Here, the...