Sentencing — reasonableness

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

Criminal

Sentencing — reasonableness

A 77-month sentence for illegal reentry is not unreasonable.

“Castro argues that he is ‘not typical of Category VI criminal history offenders’ and that the ‘remoteness of his criminal history’ counsels towards a below-Guidelines sentence because his drug trafficking convictions were all in the 1990s and he has had no further encounters with the law in the past thirteen years. Appellant Br. 19–22. Castro analogizes his case to United States v. Amezcua-Vasquez, 567 F.3d 1050 (9th Cir. 2009). Amezcua-Vasquez was an unusual case where a permanent resident convicted of two crimes of violence in 1981 was removed twenty-five years later in 2006. Id. at 1052. Two weeks later, he reentered the United States illegally and was indicted under 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). Id. Shortly after, Amezcua- Vasquez pleaded guilty. Id. His advisory sentencing guideline range was 46–57 months’ imprisonment, and he was sentenced to 52 months. Id. at 1053. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit vacated his sentence on substantive reasonableness grounds, holding ‘that the district court abused its discretion when it applied the Guidelines sentence to Amezcua without making allowances for the staleness of the prior convictions and his subsequent lack of any other convictions … .’ Id. at 1055–56. The present case is easily distinguishable from Amezcua-Vasquez. Other than both involving illegal reentry prosecutions, they share little else in common. In Amezcua-Vasquez, the defendant had two convictions twenty-five years prior to his single illegal reentry conviction, and he was sentenced to the higher end of his Guideline range. Here, Castro has accumulated six drug trafficking convictions, eight deportations, and two illegal reentry convictions prior to the underlying one in this instance, but was sentenced at the bottom of his Guideline range—despite having lived in near-continuous violation of the law for over four decades.”

Affirmed.

13-3765 U.S. v. Castro-Alvarado

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Kendall, J., Manion, J.