Sentencing Guidelines

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Gregory T. Perry v. United States of America

Case No.: 15-3494

Officials: EASTERBROOK, ROVNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing Guidelines

Eight years into a lengthy prison term, petitioner Gregory T. Perry sought to invalidate his 2007 sentence for a drug offense as unconstitutional. Perry was sentenced as a career offender under the Sentencing Guidelines. Until 2016, the career offender guideline, U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a), used a definition of a “crime of violence” that included a “residual clause” that mirrored the “violent felony” definition in the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B). In 2015, the Supreme Court struck down the statutory residual clause as unconstitutionally vague. Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551, 2563 (2015). That decision led Perry and others to raise similar vagueness challenges to sentences based on the residual clause in the guidelines. First, Perry argues that when he was sentenced in 2007, this circuit applied an erroneous and rigid proportionality test that discouraged district judges from sentencing outside the guidelines. He suggests that Gall abrogated our decision in United States v. Allan Johnson, 427 F.3d 423 (7th Cir. 2005). Next, Perry points to a separate line of our cases (decided after he was sentenced) that he reads as having prohibited district courts from disagreeing with the policy behind the career offender guideline. Because the guidelines were and remained advisory at the time of Perry’s sentencing, his vagueness challenge to the career offender guideline fails as applied at his sentencing.

Affirmed

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.