United States v. Chambers

• Citation: 956 F.3d 667
• Decision Date: 23 April 2020
• Docket Number: No. 19-7104,19-7104
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. Brooks Tyrone CHAMBERS, Defendant - Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (4th Circuit)

956 F.3d 667

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.Brooks Tyrone CHAMBERS, Defendant - Appellant.

No. 19-7104

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued: January 28, 2020

Decided: April 23, 2020

ARGUED: Joshua B. Carpenter, FEDERAL DEFENDERS OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, INC., Asheville, North Carolina, for Appellant. Amy Elizabeth Ray, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Asheville, North Carolina, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Anthony Martinez, Federal Public Defender, FEDERAL DEFENDERS OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, INC., Charlotte, North Carolina, for Appellant. R. Andrew Murray, United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charlotte, North Carolina, for Appellee.

Before FLOYD, HARRIS, and RUSHING, Circuit Judges.

Vacated and remanded by published opinion. Judge Floyd wrote the opinion in which Judge Harris joined. Judge Rushing wrote a separate dissenting opinion.

FLOYD, Circuit Judge:

Erroneously sentenced as a career offender, Brooks Tyrone Chambers is currently serving an almost 22-year prison sentence on a pre-2010 crack-cocaine offense. In 2019, he moved to reduce his sentence to time served under the First Step Act. Because the First Step Act gives retroactive effect to sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, his statutory minimum would drop from 20 years to 10 years. In his motion, he asked the district court to apply retroactive intervening case law, under which he would not be a career offender. Without the enhancement, Chambers’s Guidelines range would also drop to 57 to 71 months; with it, his Guidelines range would remain the same—262 to 327 months.

The district court determined that Chambers was eligible for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act, but it proceeded to perpetuate the career-offender error when recalculating the Guidelines. Nor did it exercise its discretion to vary downward. Instead, the court denied Chambers’s motion to reduce his custodial sentence, though it granted the motion as to his supervised release term. Because the First Step Act does not constrain courts from recognizing Guidelines errors, and because the district court seemingly believed that it could not vary from the Guidelines range to reflect post-sentencing information, we vacate the district court’s resentencing order. Additionally, we now hold that any Guidelines error deemed retroactive, such as the error in this case, must be corrected in a First Step Act resentencing.

I.

In 2003, Chambers pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute 50 or more grams of cocaine base in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1) and 846. As part of the plea agreement, the parties stipulated that Chambers was responsible for more than 50 grams but less than 150 grams of crack-cocaine. Regarding the statutory sentencing range, the government initially filed an 18 U.S.C. § 851 notice of prior conviction of a felony drug offense, under which Chambers would have been sentenced to mandatory life imprisonment. But the government partially withdrew that notice, such that Chambers faced a statutory minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life imprisonment.

Chambers was not sentenced until June 2005. In its Presentence Report (PSR), the probation office designated Chambers as a career offender based on three prior state cocaine convictions. To be a career offender, Chambers must have been previously convicted of two "crime[s] of violence" or "controlled substance offense[s]." U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a). Pertinent here, offenses only qualify if they are "punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year." Id . § 4B1.2(a)–(b). Chambers does not contest that his 1992 conviction for "Sell or Deliver Cocaine" qualified as a predicate felony. However, Chambers did not face more than a year in prison on his two other convictions: 1996 and 1997 convictions for "Felony Possession with Intent to Sell and Deliver Cocaine." Yet, because North Carolina’s sentencing structure is tied to criminal history, some repeat offenders could have faced more than a year in prison on those same offenses. And, just a month before Chambers’s sentencing, this Court decided United States v. Harp , in which we held that "we consider the maximum aggravated sentence that could be imposed for that crime upon a defendant with the worst possible criminal history." 406 F.3d 242, 246 (4th Cir. 2005) (emphasis omitted). As a career offender under Harp , Chambers was subject to a Guidelines range of 262 to 327 months’ imprisonment. The district court sentenced him at the low end to 262 months’ imprisonment, and 10 months’ supervision.

Therefore, Chambers was only sentenced as a career offender based on a "hypothetical enhancement" that he did not actually receive for either his 1996 or 1997 conviction. See United States v. Simmons , 649 F.3d 237, 243 (4th Cir. 2011). Sitting en banc, this Court later overturned Harp in Simmons and held that crimes are only punishable by a year or more as applied to the particular defendant, and not as applied to a hypothetical defendant. See id. at 249. The government does not dispute that Chambers would not have qualified as a career offender under Simmons . Moreover, we have already held that Simmons applies retroactively, meaning that the career-offender designation was just as much an error in 2005 as it was when we decided Simmons in 2011. See Miller v. United States , 735 F.3d 141, 146 (4th Cir. 2013).

Like many other First Step Act movants, Chambers was sentenced under a highly disparate sentencing scheme that "set the crack-to-powder mandatory minimum ratio at 100-to-1," disproportionately impacting African American defendants such as himself. See Dorsey v. United States , 567 U.S. 260, 268–69, 132 S.Ct. 2321, 183 L.Ed.2d 250 (2012) ; see also Kimbrough v. United States , 552 U.S. 85, 98, 128 S.Ct. 558, 169 L.Ed.2d 481 (2007) ("Approximately 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses in federal court are black; thus the severe sentences required by the 100–to–1 ratio are imposed ‘primarily upon black offenders.’ " (citation omitted)). In the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-220, 124 Stat. 2372, Congress addressed the crack-to-powder disparity by raising the quantity of cocaine base required to trigger enhanced penalties from 50 grams to 280 grams—more than stipulated in Chambers’s plea agreement.

See § 2. But Congress did not give this change retroactive effect until the passage of the First Step Act of 2018, Pub. L. No. 115-391, 132 Stat. 5194. See § 404(b). In doing so, it aimed to "allow prisoners sentenced before the Fair Sentencing Act ... to petition the court for an individualized review of their case," and to bring such pre-2010 sentences "in line" with post-2010 sentences. Fact Sheet, Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, The First Step Act of 2018 (S.3649) — as Introduced (Nov. 15, 2018) (emphasis omitted).

Under the First Step Act, sentencing courts "that imposed a sentence for a covered offense may ... impose a reduced sentence as if sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 ... were in effect at the time the covered offense was committed." See § 404(b). There is no dispute that Chambers’s 2003 conviction is a "covered offense," because his crime was "committed before August 3, 2010," and the "statutory penalties ... were modified by section 2 or 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010." See § 404(a) (defining "covered offense"). Under section 2 of the Fair Sentencing Act, Chambers would face 10 years to life and a mandatory supervision term of 8 years, rather than 20 years to life and a mandatory supervision term of 10 years. However, if the career-offender guideline enhancement was not corrected, his Guidelines range would not change from 262 to 327 months.

Accordingly, in May 2019, after serving 179 months in prison, Chambers moved to reduce his sentence under the First Step Act to time served. First and foremost, he asked the district court to correctly calculate his Guidelines range without the career-offender enhancement. In combination with the Fair Sentencing Act reforms, this calculation would result in a Guidelines range of 57 to 71 months—approximately one quarter of his erroneous career-offender range.¹ Second, if the district court declined to directly apply Simmons when recalculating the Guidelines range, Chambers asked that it vary downwards under the 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) factors in recognition of the career-offender error. Specifically, he argued that varying downwards would avoid sentencing disparities, would approximate the seriousness of the offense and achieve § 3553(a) ’s other objectives, and would reflect his good behavior and accomplishments in the Bureau of Prisons.

The district court held that Chambers was "eligible for a reduction," but denied him such a reduction as to his custodial sentence because Chambers would have received the same sentence under the Fair Sentencing Act, because he still would have faced a statutory maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and because the career-offender enhancement would still apply. United States v. Chambers , No. 3:03-CR-00131, 2019 WL 3072641, *2 (W.D.N.C. July 12, 2019). Although the court recognized that Chambers was eligible for a reduction of his custodial sentence, it declined to impose a reduced sentence here because it believed that it could not correct the erroneous career-offender designation, holding that "Section 404(b) of the First Step Act ... does not authorize such a plenary resentencing." Id . Relatedly, it held that "Section 404(b) does not contemplate that the Court would apply all other legal authority that would have impacted the Defendant’s sentence had he been sentenced today." Id .

Citing Chambers’s "history and characteristics" and the "need for deterrence and to protect the public," the district court also declined to further reduce his sentence under the § 3553(a) factors. Id. at *3.

In particular, the court found that Chambers’s "offense...