UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. RODNEY HYMES - Articles

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. RODNEY HYMES

Posted by: Karen Belcher on Dec 3, 2021

Court: 6th Circuit Court (Published Opinions)

Attorneys 1: ON BRIEF: Jennifer Niles Coffin, FEDERAL DEFENDER SERVICES OF EASTERN TENNESSEE, INC., Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant.

Attorneys 2: ON BRIEF: Brian Samuelson, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellee.

Judge(s): SUTTON, Chief Judge; SILER and READLER, Circuit Judges

Court Appealed: United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee of Chattanooga

CHAD A. READLER, Circuit Judge. Rodney Hymes pleaded guilty to possessing crack cocaine with the intent to distribute. The district court initially sentenced Hymes to 188 months of imprisonment. But while Hymes’s appeal was pending, we decided United States v. Havis, 927 F.3d 382 (6th Cir. 2019) (en banc) (per curiam), which cast doubt over the district court’s reading of the Sentencing Guidelines in Hymes’s case. Accordingly, we vacated Hymes’s sentence and remanded for resentencing in light of Havis. The district court then resentenced Hymes to a within-Guidelines sentence of 124 months of imprisonment. On appeal, Hymes finds fault with numerous aspects of the district court’s sentencing analysis, including its failure to defer to national sentencing data accumulated by the Sentencing Commission. But as the district court was not required to even consider that data (let alone defer to it), and seeing no other basis to disrupt Hymes’s sentence, we affirm.

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