UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, versus OTTO D. TAYLOR, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 19-12872
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
(December 9, 2020)
Before GRANT and MARCUS, Circuit Judges, and AXON,* District Judge
D.C. Docket No. 1:01-cr-00458-TWT-GGB-1; [PUBLISH]
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia
GRANT, Circuit
Otto Taylor was part of a drug-trafficking ring selling crack and powder cocaine in the late 1990‘s and early 2000‘s. Taylor got a life sentence, later reduced to 30 years, for his part in the drug ring.
At the time, the federal penalties for selling crack cocaine were extraordinarily harsh—a drug dealer who sold 5 grams of crack, for example, faced the same mandatory minimum sentence as one who sold 500 grams of powder cocaine. Congress has made some changes to the federal drug laws in the years since. Of particular relevance to Taylor, the First Step Act of 2018 permits district courts to reduce some of the severe sentences imposed more than a decade ago for crimes involving crack cocaine. The district court denied Taylor‘s motion for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act, however, because his offense involved powder cocaine—and lots of it—as well as crack cocaine. To resolve his appeal, we must decide whether a federal drug crime involving both crack cocaine and another controlled substance can be a “covered offense” as that term is defined in the Act. The answer is yes, so we vacate the district court‘s order denying Taylor‘s First Step Act motion and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
I.
As with all cases involving § 404 of the First Step Act, the events giving rise to this appeal began a long time ago. In 2001, a grand jury indicted Otto Taylor for one count of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances. The grand jury charged that the conspiracy involved at least 5 kilograms of a mixture containing a detectable amount of cocaine hydrochloride (powder
Roughly two years later, Taylor pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge. After the district court recited that the conspiracy involved at least 5 kilograms of powder cocaine and at least 50 grams of crack, both the government‘s and Taylor‘s lawyers agreed, without saying anything more, that the statutory range of imprisonment for the pleaded offense was ten years to life. And the lawyers were correct. At the time, § 841(b) provided that an offense involving either 50 grams or more of crack or 5 kilograms or more of powder cocaine carried a mandatory minimum of ten years’ imprisonment and a maximum of life in prison.
At the sentencing hearing, the district court found that Taylor‘s conspiracy involved more than 1.5 kilograms of crack cocaine or 150 kilograms of powder cocaine. Based on that finding and Taylor‘s criminal history, the court calculated that Taylor‘s Sentencing Guidelines sentence was life in prison. The district court expressed
But that sentence was short-lived. On direct appeal, we found that Taylor had shown plain error under United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), because the district court applied sentence enhancements under the then-mandatory Sentencing Guidelines despite its evident disagreement with the resulting life sentence. United States v. Taylor, 135 Fed. App‘x 387, 390 (11th Cir. 2005). We vacated Taylor‘s judgment and remanded for resentencing, and on remand, the district court resentenced Taylor to 360 months’ imprisonment.
That was 2005. Five years later, Congress enacted the Fair Sentencing Act to reduce the sentencing disparity between drug-trafficking crimes involving crack cocaine and those involving powder cocaine. See Dorsey v. United States, 567 U.S. 260, 268-69 (2012). While the drug-quantity provisions for offenses involving powder cocaine remained the same, the Fair Sentencing Act increased the quantity of crack cocaine required to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence from 5 grams to 28 grams and increased the quantity of crack required to trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum from 50 grams to 280 grams. Fair Sentencing Act of 2010,
Enter the First Step Act. Section 404 of that Act, passed in 2018, gives district courts the authority to apply the sentencing reforms of the Fair Sentencing Act retroactively to prisoners who were sentenced for certain crack-cocaine offenses before the Fair Sentencing Act took effect. Specifically, the First Step Act allows—but does not require—courts to reduce an eligible prisoner‘s sentence as if the drug-quantity changes in the Fair Sentencing Act were in effect at the time the prisoner committed his offense. See First Step Act of 2018,
So it was back to court for Taylor. In April 2019, he filed a motion for a plenary resentencing hearing under the First Step Act. The district court denied the motion, finding that Taylor‘s offense was not a “covered offense” under the Act because it involved, in addition to crack cocaine, 5 kilograms or more of powder cocaine, “which remains a sufficient quantity to trigger the mandatory minimum sentence under
II.
We review whether the district court had the authority to reduce Taylor‘s sentence under the First Step Act de novo. United States v. Jones, 962 F.3d 1290, 1296 (11th Cir. 2020).
III.
Determining whether a prisoner is eligible for relief under the First Step Act is a question of statutory interpretation. We begin, as always, with the text. Section 404(b) authorizes district courts to reduce
We recently made some headway in interpreting these statutory provisions in United States v. Jones, 962 F.3d 1290 (11th Cir. 2020). In Jones, we considered the appeals of four prisoners serving time for federal drug-trafficking crimes, each of whom had unsuccessfully moved for sentence reductions under § 404 of the First Step Act. We began by examining the statutory definition of a “covered offense” to decide whether the movants were eligible for relief. We explained that the term “covered offense” refers to an offense in the general sense—that is, generic conduct meeting each of the elements of a crime as it is defined by statute. Jones, 962 F.3d at 1301 (“Offenses are made up of elements.“). The “elements” of a federal drug-trafficking crime may include one or more of the drug quantities listed in the statute that sets out the penalties for such crimes.1 See
the movants in Jones were sentenced for covered offenses under the First Step Act because they were all sentenced for drug-trafficking offenses that included one of the specified drug-quantity elements—that is, an offense for which § 2 of the Fair Sentencing Act modified the statutory penalties. Id. at 1302-03.
We made clear in Jones that a defendant sentenced for a pre-2010 drug-trafficking conspiracy involving only crack cocaine has a “covered offense” if the crack-cocaine element of his offense triggered the statutory penalties in
That brings us back to the question before us: whether the First Step Act‘s definition of a “covered offense” covers a multidrug conspiracy offense that includes both a crack-cocaine element and another drug-quantity element. We hold that it does. To explain why, we review the statutes setting out the penalties for these offenses.
Here, the relevant federal criminal statute is
A drug-trafficking conspiracy or substantive drug-trafficking crime involving multiple controlled substances may include multiple drug-quantity elements, which in turn may trigger different categories of punishment, or—as here—may trigger the same penalties twice over. That is not to say that a defendant convicted of a multidrug conspiracy is subject to multiple sentences; participation in a single drug-trafficking conspiracy constitutes a single offense, for which the defendant can receive only one sentence. See Braverman v. United States, 317 U.S. 49, 54 (1942). But each drug-quantity element triggers corresponding statutory penalties, regardless of whether the offense includes one drug-quantity element or several.
Returning to the statutory text, the First Step Act defines a covered offense as “a violation of a Federal criminal statute, the statutory penalties for which were modified by section 2 or 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act.” First Step Act § 404(a). The government argues that Taylor‘s offense does not meet this definition because the powder-cocaine element of his offense would still trigger the same statutory sentencing range of ten years to life after the Fair Sentencing Act. This argument overlooks the fact that the “statutory penalties for” a drug-trafficking offense include all the penalties triggered by every drug-quantity element of the offense, not just the highest tier of penalties triggered by any one drug-quantity element.
We recognize that the distinction is subtle. But it follows from the text, which authorizes a sentence reduction for any movant who was sentenced for a covered offense. Again, an “offense” in this context is a set of statutory elements defining a crime. By conditioning eligibility on the movant‘s offense, rather than on his actual conduct or the applicable sentencing range, the First Step Act casts a wide net at the eligibility stage.
In Jones, this meant that a movant who conspired to distribute 75 kilograms of crack cocaine—a quantity more than sufficient to trigger the highest penalties under
Along the same lines, a movant who engaged in a conspiracy to distribute, say, 100 kilograms of powder cocaine and 10 grams of crack cocaine would be subject to the highest tier of penalties in the drug-trafficking statute based solely on the quantity of powder cocaine involved in the conspiracy. But the statutory penalties for his offense also include the penalties triggered by the crack-cocaine element of the offense, regardless of whether those are the penalties that actually apply at sentencing. Before the Fair Sentencing Act, the crack-cocaine element (5 or more grams of crack cocaine) of this hypothetical offense triggered the intermediate category of penalties; after the Fair Sentencing Act, that same crack-cocaine element triggers the lowest tier of penalties for cocaine-related offenses. Compare
ultimately would be subject to the same statutory sentencing range as a consequence of another drug-quantity element of the offense.
Taylor‘s offense was conspiring to possess with intent to distribute at least 5 kilograms of powder cocaine and at least 50 grams of crack cocaine. Before the Fair Sentencing Act, those drug quantities satisfied the drug-quantity elements in
Of course, any sentence reduction would have to be made “as if sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act . . . were in effect at the time the covered offense was committed.” Id. § 404(b). As we explained in Jones, this “as if” clause means that (1) a movant who was sentenced to the lowest statutory penalty available to
IV.
Our conclusion that Taylor is eligible for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act brings us to Taylor‘s argument about the kind of proceedings the Act requires. In the district court, Taylor argued that he was entitled to a full resentencing hearing, with the benefit of all the changes in the law since his original sentencing in 2001. At oral argument, he acknowledged that we have resolved this issue against him during the pendency of his appeal. For the sake of completeness, we reiterate that “the First Step Act does not authorize the district court to conduct a plenary or de novo resentencing.” United States v. Denson, 963 F.3d 1080, 1089 (11th Cir. 2020). The authority to reduce Taylor‘s sentence “as if sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act” were in effect when Taylor committed his offense does not permit the court to reduce Taylor‘s “sentence on the covered offense based on changes in the law beyond those mandated by” those sections. Id. Indeed, the First Step Act does not require the district court to hold a hearing at all before deciding whether and to what extent to reduce Taylor‘s sentence under the Act. Id. at 1087.
And we emphasize that the fact that Taylor is eligible for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act does not mean that he is entitled to one. First Step Act § 404(c). “District courts have wide latitude to determine whether and how to exercise their discretion in this context.” Jones, 962 F.3d at 1304. On remand, it is fair game for the district court to consider any information relevant to its decision, including its previous findings regarding the quantities of crack and powder cocaine involved in the conspiracy, and the fact that the powder cocaine element of Taylor‘s offense still triggers the highest tier of statutory penalties. See id. at 1301–02, 1304.
* * *
Taylor‘s drug-trafficking conspiracy involved significant amounts of both crack and powder cocaine, each of which triggered the most severe penalties in the drug-trafficking statute at the time he was sentenced. By effectively reducing the penalties triggered by the crack-cocaine element of Taylor‘s offense, the Fair Sentencing Act modified the statutory penalties for his offense as a whole. His offense is therefore a “covered offense” as that term is defined in § 404 of the First Step Act, and the district court was authorized—but not required—to reduce Taylor‘s sentence as provided in the Act. Because the district court erred in determining that Taylor was not eligible for First Step Act relief, we vacate the court‘s order and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
VACATED AND REMANDED.