What happened
The Fifth Circuit on Friday affirmed a 15-year prison sentence for a Mississippi man who argued that a state-court expungement should have kept an old marijuana conviction out of his federal criminal history score.
A three-judge panel said the district court properly counted Juan Payne’s 2006 marijuana conviction when calculating his sentence after he pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine. The panel said the Sentencing Guidelines ask why a conviction was expunged, not whether state law used the word “expunged.”
Writing for the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Edith Brown Clement said the Guidelines require federal sentencing courts to look past state-law labels and examine the rationale for the expungement. The dispositive question, the court said, is whether the conviction was expunged because of innocence or legal error. Payne’s was not, the panel concluded, and the opinion said an expungement may aid reintegration but “does not shield them from the consequences of their recidivism.”
Payne was indicted after allegedly selling 461.9 grams of methamphetamine to a confidential government informant in two transactions, pleaded guilty to one count, and obtained the Mississippi expungement while the federal case was pending. The presentence report counted the marijuana conviction, deemed Payne a career offender, and calculated a Guidelines range of 262 to 327 months; an addendum said the range would be 120 to 121 months if the conviction were not counted.
The Fifth Circuit assumed without deciding that the Mississippi expungement was valid under state law, then held that validity did not answer the federal Guidelines question. The panel relied on its own precedent and decisions from other circuits to conclude that expungements aimed at rehabilitation, civil-rights restoration or stigma removal do not erase a prior conviction for federal sentencing purposes when they are not based on innocence or legal error.
The panel also said any error would have been harmless because the sentencing judge considered both the higher and lower ranges and twice said the same sentence would apply either way. The Fifth Circuit therefore affirmed Payne’s sentence.