7th Circuit orders resentencing in career offender’s bank robbery, carjacking

A man convicted of armed robbery will again have his sentence reconsidered after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals found a district court failed to sufficiently justify why it deviated from his sentencing guideline range by more than 37 years.

In 1997, Jerry Jones and two other individuals robbed a central Indiana bank and got away with more than $100,000. While escaping police, Jones and the others crashed their vehicle, fled into a corn field, and hid out in a farmer’s house for more than six hours. When the owners returned home, all three of the home’s inhabitants were ordered at gunpoint to sit in the hallway while the men coerced the father of the family to drive them back to Indianapolis.

A federal grand jury later indicted Jones on one count of armed bank robbery, two counts of carjacking, and three counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence. Based on his two prior convictions for breaking and entering and armed robbery, Jones qualified as a career offender under Sentencing Guideline § 4B1.1 and the Southern District Court sentenced him to 70 years in prison.

When Jones in 2018 petitioned the district court for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 arguing he was no longer a career offender based on intervening Supreme Court precedents, the district court agreed, vacated Jones’s sentence, and ordered resentencing. But although Jones’ effective guidelines range was 348–390 months, the district court settled on 840-months — the length of Jones’ first sentence.

The 7th Circuit vacated that decision in USA v. Jerry J. Jones, 19-1644, concluding that the district court did not sufficiently justify the extent of its 450-month deviation from the high end of Jones’ effective guidelines range, calling a deviation of such magnitude “significant.”

“A significant deviation, like this one, requires an especially compelling justification. The district court did not provide the necessary analysis here. For instance, there is nothing in the record demonstrating that the district court gave ‘respectful consideration to the judgment embodied in the guidelines range that [it] compute[d],’” Circuit Judge Joel Flaum wrote for the 7th Circuit.

“Here, the district court acknowledged the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities, noting that Jones’s co-defendants — ‘with similar records [and] similar conduct’ — had received sentences of 675 months and 728 months. Notwithstanding the three defendants’ similar records and similar conduct, Jones received a sentence 165 months longer than one co-defendant and 112 months longer than the other. The court did not explain why it singled Jones out for different treatment. Quite the contrary, it synthesized the offenders and their offenses, observing they had ‘similar records [and] similar conduct.’ It was therefore incumbent on the court to specify what warranted Jones’s sentence disparity,” the 7th Circuit wrote.

Without such a justification, the 7th Circuit found itself unassured that the district court sufficiently considered the interest in consistency between similarly situated defendants. It further noted the “critical fact” that the guidelines did not entirely account for the break-in to the farmhouse, and that the district court did not conclude that action aggravated the offensives.

“The record does not indicate one way or the other why any figure between 390 and 840 months would not be a ‘sufficient, but not greater than necessary’ sentence for Jones. Instead, we are left to speculate whether the court fully appreciated that it was adding 450 months to the range and why it thought it was appropriate to do so,” the 7th Circuit wrote.

After offering two different avenues that the district court may use to gauge the magnitude of deviation from the guidelines, the panel concluded that “For now, it is enough for us to resolve this dispute to say that the district court procedurally erred by not providing an adequate explanation for its upward deviation from the Guidelines.”

It therefore remanded the case to the Southern District for resentencing.