Cenious Brewster pleaded guilty to one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm after leading police on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash. During the chase, Brewster drove over 100 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone, made unsafe lane changes, and drove over a median, crashing into a building near an intersection where another vehicle was present. The district court sentenced him to 46 months in prison, applying a two-level enhancement for reckless endangerment during flight under U.S.S.G. § 3C1.2. Brewster appealed, challenging the enhancement, arguing the court misunderstood his request for a downward departure based on racial profiling concerns, and claiming the court violated his due process rights by relying on the Sentencing Commission's JSIN online tool for sentencing data.
The panel affirmed the sentence on three main grounds. First, regarding the reckless endangerment enhancement, the court held that even assuming the guideline requires endangering a specific person, the district court did not clearly err in finding that Brewster's flight put at least one motorist at substantial risk of serious bodily injury. The court relied on dashcam video showing Brewster driving out of control near other vehicles, noting that Brewster's own declaration contradicting this was 'utterly discredited' by the video. Second, the court found Brewster forfeited his argument that the district court misunderstood his request for a downward departure. During the hearing, Brewster's counsel confirmed the court had correctly characterized the request, meaning any error is reviewed for plain error, which Brewster failed to demonstrate. Third, the court rejected the due process challenge to the JSIN data. The Sentencing Commission is a presumptively reliable source, and the JSIN tool was designed specifically for judges to fulfill their obligation under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6) to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities. The data was corroborated by the Commission's Interactive Data Analyzer, and Brewster offered no evidence to contradict the data's reliability or show that an evidentiary hearing was necessary. The court also denied a motion for supplemental briefing on a Second Amendment challenge, ruling that Brewster failed to raise the issue in the district court and offered no good cause for the delay.
The decision affirms the 46-month prison term and clarifies that district courts may rely on JSIN data to consider sentencing disparities without an evidentiary hearing, provided the data comes from a reliable source and is corroborated. It also establishes that defendants must object to the characterization of their sentencing requests at the hearing to preserve arguments regarding misunderstandings, and that Second Amendment challenges to felon-in-possession convictions must be raised in the district court to be reviewed on appeal.
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