Split Fourth Circuit panel reverses denial of sentence reduction motion and orders 20-year reduction based on stacked § 924(c)

A helpful reader made sure that I did not miss a notable Fourth Circuit ruling today in US v. Brown, No. 21-7752 (4th Cir. Aug. 16, 2023) (available here). The majority opinion for the court begins this way:

On July 30, 2014, a jury convicted Kelvin Brown on seven counts, including two counts of possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). At the time of Brown’s sentencing, his two § 924(c) convictions carried a five- and twenty-five-year mandatory minimum sentence, respectively. The district court thus sentenced Brown to thirty years in prison for his § 924(c) convictions, and, together with his other five convictions, to fifty-seven years’ imprisonment total.

In July 2020, Brown moved for compassionate release pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A). Brown primarily argued that his release was warranted because he was at risk of serious illness from COVID-19 and because, under the First Step Act’s amendment to § 924(c) sentencing, he would only be subject to a combined ten-year mandatory minimum for his two § 924(c) convictions if sentenced today.  The district court twice denied Brown’s motion, each time without addressing the disparity between his § 924(c) sentence and the much shorter mandatory minimums the First Step Act now prescribes.

We hold that the district court abused its discretion by denying Brown’s motion because his disparate sentence creates an “extraordinary and compelling reason” for his early release, and the § 3553(a) sentencing factors overwhelmingly favor a sentence reduction.  We therefore reverse and remand with instructions to rectify that disparity and reduce Brown’s prison sentence by twenty years.

The majority opinion concludes with some explanation for why it orders a 20-year sentence reduction rather than another remand:

“Ordinarily, we understand that district courts wield broad discretion in deciding compassionate release motions.” Malone, 57 F.4th at 177.  So, in a different case, we might remedy the district court’s error by remanding for the district court to consider Brown’s disparate sentence in the first instance.  Yet the district court here has already had two opportunities to review Brown’s compassionate release motion: its initial denial of Brown’s motion in July 2020, and its second denial in December 2021 after we remanded Brown’s case for further consideration.  Each time, the district court neglected to address Brown’s disparate sentence. That neglect persisted despite our express recognition in our previous remand order that McCoy — and its holding that disparate § 924(c) sentences can constitute “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for release — “is relevant to this case.” Brown, 2021 WL 4461607, at *2 n.4.

The dissent, authored by Judge Quattlebaum, starts this way:

In an extraordinary and, in my view, regrettable decision, the majority reverses the district court’s order denying Brown’s motion for compassionate release.  It does so only by imposing a standard for explaining decisions that is more demanding than what the Supreme Court recently established. Concepcion v. United States, 142 S. Ct. 2389, 2405 (2022) (“All that is required is for a district court to demonstrate that it has considered the arguments before it.”).  But the majority does not stop there. It then usurps the district court’s assigned responsibility by stepping in to re-weigh the sentencing factors, substitute its judgment for that of the district court and order a 20-year sentence reduction.  The majority may well be troubled by the length of Brown’s original sentence.  But our ordered system of justice requires that appellate courts apply standards set forth by the Supreme Court. And it requires that discretionary sentencing decisions be made by district court judges.  The majority today does neither.  I dissent.