USA v. Joseph Phelps

Phelps was convicted of conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine and was sentenced to 120 months in prison, the statutory minimum. The Sentencing Guidelines range was 188–235 months. A year later the government moved for a sentence reduction as a reward for his substantial assistance. The court reduced the sentence to 60 months. Months later, Sentencing Guidelines Amendment 782 took effect, retroactively reducing Phelps’s guideline range to 151–188 months. Phelps moved, under 18 U.S.C. 3582(c)(2), for a sentence reduction to 48 months. The judge calculated that a “reduction comparably less than” the amended range in Phelps’s case would be 75 months, not 48 months, by comparing Phelps’s 60-month sentence to the below-guideline sentence of 120 months that the court had originally imposed. The 60-month term was 50% of the original sentence. The Seventh Circuit reversed. To calculate a sentence that is “comparably less than the amended guideline range,” the Sentencing Commission instructs the court to compare the defendant’s current below-guideline sentence to the original unamended guideline range, convert the difference to a percentage, and apply that percentage reduction to the amended range. This approach applies even where the government’s substantial-assistance motion came after the court imposed a below-range sentence for some other reason. View "USA v. Joseph Phelps" on Justia Law