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United States of America v. John M. Wyatt

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On Petition for Rehearing

Before EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge, and COFFEY*fn1 and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

John M. Wyatt is caught in a procedural mess from which we cannot extricate him. Wyatt was convicted of a drug offense in the Southern District of Illinois, a court sitting within the Seventh Circuit. He is incarcerated in the Western District of Texas, which sits in the Fifth Circuit. The district court that sentenced him concluded that he was a career offender under section 4B1.1 of the Sentencing Guidelines, based, in part, on an erroneous assumption that it should treat his prior conviction for a walkaway escape from a halfway house as a qualifying felony for the career-offender adjustment. The court did not make this assumption without cause; that was the law of this circuit at the time. See United States v. Bryant, 310 F.3d 550, 554 (7th Cir. 2002). With the career offender finding, Wyatt’s sentencing guidelines range was 262 to 327 months’ imprisonment, and the court sentenced Wyatt to 262 months. Although it is difficult to discern from the record as it currently stands what the range would have been without the career offender finding, Wyatt’s base offense level for his conviction was 26, which, combined with his criminal history category of VI would have resulted in a guidelines range of 120 to 150 months.*fn2

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