Background
The defendant, a native of Mexico, pled guilty to illegally reentering the United States while on supervised release for a prior illegal reentry conviction. He had been deported four times and convicted for illegal reentry four times previously. The district court sentenced him to twenty-eight months total in prison for the illegal reentry conviction and the supervised release violation.
The court’s reasoning
The court applied a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard to review the substantive reasonableness of the sentences. Because both sentences fell within the correctly calculated Sentencing Guidelines ranges, they were presumed reasonable. The defendant argued that his criminal history category overrepresented his record and that there were sentencing disparities, but he presented no statistics or cases to support these claims. The court noted that the defendant received a sentence consistent with the median for similar defendants and that the district court properly considered the statutory factors.
What it means going forward
The decision reinforces that defendants challenging the length of a sentence within the Guidelines range bear a heavy burden to prove unwarranted disparities with no evidence.