Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Illegal re-entry 16-level bump error

US v. Parral-Dominguez:  Mr. Parral-Dominguez was arrested in North Carolina in 2010 in possession of more than an ounce of cocaine.  He pleaded guilty in state court to drug trafficking charges, and state authorities informed ICE of his illegal status; he had been previously deported in 2007.  He was indicted federally for illegal reentry at the end of 2013, and pleaded guilty in March 2014 without a plea agreement.

Parral-Dominguez made a single objection to the PSR, to a 16-level bump to his offense level for having been convicted previously of a crime of violence, arguing that as a matter of law, the North Carolina state offense of shooting into an occupied building (for which he had been convicted in 2007, which lead to his deportation) did not constitute a crime of violence.  The district court disagreed, and imposed the enhancement, and in its sentencing order, it relied heavily on an unpublished decision to conclude that the state offense was a crime of violence.  Parral-Dominguez appealed.

The Fourth Circuit resolved the issue in Parral-Dominguez’s favor, finding that the North Carolina state offense of discharging a firearm into an occupied building does not constitute a crime of violence for federal sentencing purposes.  The Fourth Circuit applied the categorical approach, finding that the statute at stake does not require that an offender use force against another person in order to complete the crime.

The Fourth Circuit found that this procedural error was not harmless because it could not say that regardless of the calculated Guidelines range, 65 months is the “only” sentence the defendant would have received, and the district court gave no indication that it would have imposed a similar sentence regardless of any procedural error.

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