USA v. Demetrius Holmes, et al

Filing

OPINION filed : The district court's sentence is AFFIRMED, decision not for publication. Karen Nelson Moore, Circuit Judge; Ronald Lee Gilman, Circuit Judge and Deborah L. Cook, Circuit Judge (Authoring) .

Case: 16-5503

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NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION
File Name: 17a0326n.06

FILED

Case No. 16-5503
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
DEMETRIUS HOLMES,
Defendant-Appellant.

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Jun 09, 2017
DEBORAH S. HUNT, Clerk

ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED
STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR
THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF
TENNESSEE

BEFORE: MOORE, GILMAN, and COOK, Circuit Judges.
COOK, Circuit Judge. Demetrius Holmes pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute and
possess with intent to distribute at least five hundred grams of cocaine, in violation of 21 U.S.C.
§§ 846 and 841(a)(1).

At sentencing, the government argued that Holmes’s two prior

convictions—facilitation of aggravated robbery and voluntary manslaughter—rendered him a
career offender under the sentencing guidelines, see U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1. Pointing to defects in the
state-court judgments, Holmes contested the career-offender classification. The district court
overruled Holmes’s objections and sentenced him as a career offender to 188 months’
imprisonment. On appeal, Holmes argues that the district court erred in finding the existence of
the career-offender predicates. We AFFIRM.

Case: 16-5503

Document: 35-2

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Case No. 16-5503, United States v. Holmes

I.
“We review a district court’s factual findings at sentencing, including findings as to the
existence of prior convictions, for clear error.” United States v. Hockenberry, 730 F.3d 645, 663
(6th Cir. 2013) (citation omitted). Holmes contests the reliability of the evidence that the
sentencing court relied upon to confirm his two prior convictions. We consider the evidence of
each conviction in turn.
A.

Facilitation of Aggravated Robbery

In 2000, a Knox County, Tennessee, jury convicted Holmes of aggravated robbery.
State v. Holmes, No. E2000-02263-CCA-R3-CD, 2001 WL 1538517, at *1 (Tenn. Crim. App.
Nov. 30, 2001). The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction, however,
reasoning that a detective’s improper testimony undermined the verdict’s reliability. Id. at *3,
*5. The State retried him in 2005, and the jury convicted him of the lesser-included offense of
facilitation of aggravated robbery. State v. Holmes, No. E2006-00393-CCA-R3-CD, 2006 WL
3628090, at *1 (Tenn. Crim. App. Dec. 14, 2006).
The district court didn’t clearly err when determining that Holmes committed this careeroffender predicate, given that the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion of record
provides reliable evidence of Holmes’s facilitation-of-aggravated-robbery conviction, see id. In
addition, an expert testified that Holmes’s fingerprints match the fingerprints of the “Demetrius
Holmes” in that case, and booking photos from the Tennessee Department of Corrections
corroborate Holmes’s identity as the defendant.
In response, Holmes takes aim not at the appellate court’s opinion, the fingerprints, or the
booking photos, but at flaws appearing on the face of the state-court-judgment document itself.
Specifically, he notes that the Knox County Clerk’s Office certified the judgment in 2016—a

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Case No. 16-5503, United States v. Holmes

decade after Holmes’s conviction—and that the judgment document misstates many of the
relevant dates. Although we agree that the document’s irregularities undercut its reliability,
nothing requires the government to establish a prior conviction using only one kind of
documentation.1 United States v. Chisom, 249 F. App’x 406, 411 (6th Cir. 2007). And given the
other compelling evidence, the district court properly found Holmes’s conviction for this offense.
Holmes also argues that because the Knox County Clerk’s Office filed the facilitation-ofaggravated-robbery judgment in 2016—after the date of Holmes’s federal offense—it was not a
“prior felony conviction[]” under U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a) (emphasis added).

But U.S.S.G.

§ 4B1.2(c) provides that the “date that a defendant sustained a conviction shall be the date that
the guilt of the defendant has been established,” not the date that the clerk’s office certifies the
judgment.

The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion confirms that a jury found

Holmes guilty in 2005, prior to the date of Holmes’s federal offense.
We therefore conclude that the district court did not clearly err in finding Holmes’s
facilitation-of-aggravated-robbery conviction to be a career-offender predicate offense.
B.

Voluntary Manslaughter

Another jury convicted Holmes of felony murder and especially aggravated robbery. On
collateral review of that conviction, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the
verdict, reasoning that his attorneys were constitutionally defective. Holmes v. State, No. E200302306-CCA-R3-PC, 2004 WL 2253991, at *1, *6 (Oct. 7, 2004). Holmes then pleaded guilty to
the lesser-included offense of voluntary manslaughter in January 2006.

1

Nothing in the record conclusively explains the Knox County Clerk’s Office’s shoddy
recordkeeping. One offered explanation is that the judge who oversaw Holmes’s trial and
sentencing, Richard Baumgartner, was a drug addict, who has since been disbarred. See
generally United States v. Baumgartner, 581 F. App’x 522 (6th Cir. 2014).
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The United States Attorney’s Office presented a certified judgment to establish Holmes’s
voluntary-manslaughter conviction. Because the judgment lists the wrong birth date and social
security number (it’s unclear whether the inaccuracies resulted from Holmes’s false reporting or
from administrative error), Holmes disputes the judgment’s reliability. But once again, the
government offered fingerprint evidence confirming Holmes’s identity as the defendant in that
case.

Furthermore, the government introduced evidence that Holmes used multiple social

security numbers, including the number listed in the voluntary-manslaughter judgment. The
district court therefore did not clearly err in finding that Holmes’s prior felony conviction for
voluntary manslaughter qualified as a career-offender predicate.
II.
For these reasons, we affirm the district court’s sentence.

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