United States v. Thompson — criminal — affirmance — Greenaway

In 2014, the US Sentencing Commission amended the sentencing guidelines to retroactively reduce the advisory range for many drug-crime sentences. A defendant who was sentenced before the change can get the reduction too, but only if their sentence was “based on” the earlier higher range and the reduction would be consistent with Sentencing Commission policy, 18 USC § 3582. A different guideline range applies to career offenders, and that range didn’t go down.

Today’s appeal presents an interesting question: what about defendants who qualified to be sentenced using the career-offender range (which didn’t change) but who made a deal so that they actually were sentenced under the standard range (which did). Can they get the reduction?

The Sentencing Commission answered this question, unfavorably to defendants, in a policy statement called Amendment 759. But both of the defendants here committed their crimes before Amendment 759 was enacted, and they argued that applying it against them would be ex post facto punishment.

Today, the Third Circuit held that the defendants’ sentences were “based on” the lowered guidelines range but that reducing their sentences was not consistent with Sentencing Commission policy, and that applying the policy against them did not violate the ex post facto clause because denying them the reduction “does not lengthen the period of time they will spend incarcerated–it merely denies them the benefit of a discretionary reduction of that period of time.” (Offhand I’d have thought the sounder basis for rejecting the defendants’ position was that at the time of their crimes they had no grounds to expect a non-career-offender-range deal.)

Joining Greenaway were Vanaskie and Shwartz. The case was decided without oral argument; pending Third Circuit nominee Rebecca Haywood was one of the government’s attorneys.