What happened
The First Circuit vacated Joan Rosado Maldonado's 60-month prison sentence Monday and ordered resentencing in his felon-in-possession case, holding that two Massachusetts cocaine convictions should not have been used to raise his federal sentencing guideline range.
Maldonado pleaded guilty to being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and ammunition. The sentencing dispute turned on whether his prior Massachusetts convictions counted as controlled substance offenses under the guideline provision that sets a higher base offense level for firearm defendants with at least two qualifying predicates.
The presentence report assigned Maldonado a base offense level of 24 after treating the convictions as qualifying predicates and calculated an advisory range of 70 to 87 months. Maldonado argued the range should have been 46 to 57 months because Massachusetts' definition of cocaine covered ioflupane, a cocaine-derived substance that federal law had not scheduled as a controlled substance since 2015.
The district court rejected that objection, concluding that the guideline term controlled substance included drugs regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act as well as substances defined by state law. It then imposed a below-guidelines sentence of 60 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Chief Judge David J. Barron, writing for the panel, said the First Circuit agreed with Maldonado. Relying on the court's same-day decision in United States v. Fulcar, the panel held that the guideline term controlled substance covers only substances regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act.
Because Massachusetts' cocaine definition was not a categorical match to the federal schedules at the time of Maldonado's federal sentencing, the panel held that his two state convictions did not qualify as controlled substance offenses under Guideline Section 4B1.2(b). The court said the error required vacatur because there was no indication the district court inevitably would have imposed the same sentence under the lower range.
The panel did not reach Maldonado's separate challenges to two supervised release conditions, including one the government conceded was imposed in error. Because the case is returning for resentencing, the First Circuit said the district court could clear up any ambiguity in the conditions when imposing a new sentence.