US v. Edwards: Edwards pled guilty from escaping from a halfway house in North Carolina. In the PSR, the probation officer calculated his criminal history score by including, counting for three points, a prior state sentence for fleeing to elude, for which he had been placed on “special probation” with a credit for 53 days already served and a 12-month sentence suspended; but that probation was revoked, triggering the 12-month sentence. Edwards objected, arguing that the original 53-day term and later 12-month term could not be aggregated to produce a sentence of longer than 12 months that counted for criminal history points. The district court disagreed and imposed a bottom-of-the-Guideline sentence of 24 months (making it clear it would have imposed the same sentence regardless).
On appeal, the Fourth Circuit affirmed Edwards’ sentence. Noting that the North Carolina courts had not directly addressed the issue of how the two periods of incarceration interacted with one another, the court looked to the plain language of the statute and concluded that it was appropriate to aggregate them. That it, the statute authorized both “active” and a “suspended” terms of imprisonment and did not suggest they should not be considered in the aggregate.
No comments:
Post a Comment