Larone Frederick Elijah v. United States

In Rosales-Mireles, 138 S. Ct. 1897 (2018), this Court held that “before a court of appeals can consider the substantive reasonableness of a sentence, [i]t must first ensure that the district court committed no significant procedural error, such as failing to calculate (or improperly calculating) the Guidelines range.” 138 S. Ct. at 1910. The question presented by the Petition is this: When a criminal defendant argues that a district court made an error in calculating his United States Sentencing Guidelines range resulting in a sentence that was a nearly 700% upward variance from the correct range, should an appellate court be permitted to skip right to a substantive reasonableness analysis, presuming for purposes of harmless error review, that the district court would have awarded the same sentence even if it had decided the Guidelines issue in the defendant’s favor based only on the district court’s conclusory assertion that it would have issued the same sentence as an alternative variance sentence.