United States v. Heard

2 Citing cases

  1. United States v. Drake

    Case No. 19-5273 (6th Cir. Feb. 20, 2020)   Cited 1 times
    Upholding as substantively reasonable 300-month prison sentence for distribution of fentanyl resulting in death, when guideline range was 240 months, where defendant distributed fentanyl to one who then redistributed it to another who died from the drug

    But "[t]his court has consistently rejected [this] general argument: that a sentence is substantively unreasonable whenever a district court considers conduct in imposing a variance that was already used to calculate the Guidelines range." United States v. Heard, 749 F. App'x 367, 372 (6th Cir. 2018) (collecting cases); see also id. at 381 ("Double-counting is not, in and of itself, a problem.") (Moore, J., dissenting). So, Mr. Drake's argument that the variance was unreasonable simply because the district court double-counted must fail.

  2. United States v. Hatcher

    947 F.3d 383 (6th Cir. 2020)   Cited 25 times
    Finding procedural unreasonableness where the district court relied on unsworn testimony of a special agent that shell casings from a shooting matched a firearm discovered on the defendant three days later and the government did not allege but merely stated that it was a "possibility" that the defendant was involved in the shooting; discussing similar cases where the district court relied on "similarly threadbare evidence to connect a defendant to other criminal conduct" at sentencing

    Put simply, "the district court was imputing some nefarious conduct to [Hatcher] that the record simply does not support." United States v. Heard , 749 F. App'x 367, 384 (6th Cir. 2018) (Moore, J., dissenting). To rely on such an inference based on a complete absence of record evidence was plain error.