Joseph Lamonte Ott was convicted in the Southern District of Florida for bank robbery. During his sentencing, the government sought to apply a career offender enhancement under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which requires two prior felony convictions for crimes of violence. Ott objected to this enhancement based on a 2010 New York conviction for attempted second-degree robbery. He argued that an attempt to commit a crime does not qualify as a crime of violence under the Guidelines. The district court rejected this argument, relying on a 2023 amendment to the Guidelines that clarified the inclusion of inchoate offenses, and sentenced Ott to 168 months of imprisonment. Ott appealed, renewing his claim that his prior attempt conviction should not count as a predicate offense.
The Eleventh Circuit applied the categorical approach to determine if Ott's prior conviction qualified as a crime of violence. The court first established that completed New York second-degree robbery is a crime of violence because it involves the forcible stealing of property, satisfying the elements clause of the Guidelines. The core legal issue was whether an attempt to commit that robbery also qualified. The court noted that while the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Taylor held that attempted Hobbs Act robbery was not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), the Sentencing Commission addressed this specific gap in 2023. The Commission amended the Guidelines to state that the terms 'crime of violence' and 'controlled substance offense' include 'the offenses of aiding and abetting, attempting to commit, or conspiring to commit any such offense.' The court reasoned that this amendment was unambiguous and moved the provision from commentary to the text of the guideline to ensure it applied to both the elements clause and the enumerated offenses clause. Consequently, because the underlying completed crime (New York robbery) is a crime of violence, the attempt to commit it is also a crime of violence under the Guidelines. The court rejected Ott's argument that the amendment only applied to enumerated offenses, pointing to the structure of the guideline which defines 'crime of violence' broadly in subsection (a) before subsection (d) expands that definition to include inchoate offenses.
This decision clarifies that defendants with prior convictions for attempted crimes of violence, such as attempted robbery, will be subject to career offender enhancements under the Sentencing Guidelines. It resolves a circuit split regarding the scope of inchoate offenses by enforcing the 2023 amendment's plain text. The ruling limits the applicability of the Supreme Court's Taylor decision to statutes that lack the specific inchoate-inclusion language found in the Sentencing Guidelines. No remand was ordered; the sentence was affirmed.