US v. Mateo-Medina — criminal — reversal — McKee

UPDATE 1/3/17: as discussed in the comments here, the court vacated this opinion today. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 1/9/17: revised opinion here, and the original opinion is no longer on the CA3 website.

The Third Circuit today reversed a criminal sentence under plain error review, holding that the district court plainly erred when it considered the defendant’s bare arrests (arrests that did not result in convictions) in deciding his sentence.

Two points bear noting.

First, the court reversed under plain error even though the district court did not explicitly say it was considering bare arrests in deciding the sentence. The district court said it could not overlook his rather extensive criminal history, and it noted his seven [actually six] arrests and two convictions. The court said the error was still plain because the court could not have thought the two convictions alone were a rather extensive criminal history. That makes sense as far as it goes, although offhand I’m not sure how comfortably it jibes with all the other ways sentencing judges consider conduct the defendant was never convicted of.

Second, the court emphasized that relying on bare arrests exacerbates the impact of implicit bias on sentences:

The Sentencing Project Report also remarked on recent research indicating that police are more likely to stop, and arrest, people of color due to implicit bias. Implicit bias, or stereotyping, consists of the unconscious assumptions that humans make about individuals, particularly in situations that require rapid decision-making, such as police encounters.32 “Extensive research has shown that in such situations the vast majority of Americans of all races implicitly associate black Americans with adjectives such as ‘dangerous,’ ‘aggressive,’ ‘violent,’ and ‘criminal.’”33 In addition, a recent empirical study analyzed thirteen years’ worth of data on race, socioeconomic factors, drug use, and drug arrests.34 The study found that African-Americans, Hispanics, and whites used drugs in roughly the same percentages, and in roughly the same ways.35 The study controlled for variables such as whether the participant lived in high-crime, gang-controlled areas. Despite those controls, the study concluded that “in early adulthood, race disparities in drug arrest[s] grew substantially; as early as age 22, African-Americans had 83% greater odds of a drug arrest than whites and at age 27 this disparity was 235%.”36 With respect to Hispanics, the study found that socioeconomic factors such as residing in an inner-city neighborhood accounted for much of the disparity in drug arrest rates.37

Pretty extraordinary.

Joining McKee were Fuentes and Roth. The case was decided without oral argument.