16-level bump affirmed

US v. Walker:  In this case, a Jamaican national pleaded guilty to illegal reentry, and the district court that sentenced him found him to have been previously convicted of an aggravated felony.  This prior offense was a drug conviction from Ohio, which the district court concluded was a “drug trafficking offense” which called for a 16-level enhancement of Walker’s sentence, yielding an advisory guidelines range for Walker of 46-57 months.  The district court imposed a 30-month sentence, and Walker appealed the issue of whether his drug crime was a “drug trafficking offense.”

The Fourth Circuit affirmed the application of the enhancement to Walker’s sentence, after concluding that his prior drug conviction from Ohio qualified as a “drug trafficking offense” under the illegal reentry guideline, then in effect.  In 2004, Walker pleaded guilty to a charge of drug trafficking under Ohio law.  Walker argued that the conviction should not qualify as a “drug trafficking offense” because the statute required only that the defendant act knowingly, rather than with specific intent, as he argued was required by the guidelines.  The Fourth Circuit disagreed, finding that Walker misread the guidelines’ definition of “drug trafficking offense,” and that the absence of a specific-intent requirement in the Ohio statute does not prevent the 2004 conviction from qualifying as a drug trafficking offense under the guidelines.

The Fourth Circuit analyzed the Ohio statute using the categorical approach, stating that the Ohio statute qualifies as a drug trafficking offense only if all of the ways of violating the statute, including the least culpable, satisfy the definition of “drug trafficking offense.”  The 10th circuit considered the same Ohio statute and found that it qualified as a “controlled substance offense” under the career-offender guideline, concluding that all the acts prohibited by the Ohio statute qualified as “distribution.”  The Fourth Circuit agreed with 10th Circuit and concluded here that Walker’s conviction from Ohio qualified as a “drug trafficking offense” and the 16-level enhancement to his sentence was proper.

(Decided 5/24/17).