United States v. Leroy Lunceford ( 2021 )

UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 20-4339
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff - Appellee,
v.
LEROY ALLEN LUNCEFORD,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, at
Greensboro. William L. Osteen, Jr., District Judge. (1:19-cr-00517-WO-3)
Submitted: January 26, 2021 Decided: February 11, 2021
Before DIAZ, FLOYD, and THACKER, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
Michael W. Patrick, LAW OFFICE OF MICHAEL W. PATRICK, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, for Appellant. Matthew G.T. Martin, United States Attorney, Michael A.
DeFranco, Assistant United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES
ATTORNEY, Greensboro, North Carolina, for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
PER CURIAM:
Leroy Allen Lunceford pleaded guilty to distributing heroin, in violation of 21
U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), (b)(1)(C), and the district court sentenced him to 64 months’
imprisonment. On appeal, Lunceford argues that the court erred in calculating the drug
quantity attributable to him. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.
“We review the district court’s calculation of the quantity of drugs attributable to a
defendant for sentencing purposes for clear error.” United States v. Crawford, 734 F.3d
339, 342 (4th Cir. 2013) (internal quotation marks omitted). Clear error occurs “only when
the reviewing court on the entire evidence is left with the definite and firm conviction that
a mistake has been committed.” United States v. Slager, 912 F.3d 224, 233 (4th Cir.)
(internal quotation marks omitted), cert. denied, 139 S. Ct. 2679 (2019). Here, the district
court—relying upon Lunceford’s own statements regarding his daily heroin use, controlled
sales Lunceford made to a confidential informant, and Lunceford’s codefendants’
statements regarding heroin prices and sales—conservatively estimated that Lunceford
sold 197.6 grams of heroin within the relevant period of the offenses. At sentencing, the
court, recognizing the imprecision that often plagues drug weight determinations, reduced
the drug weight to 99 grams, giving Lunceford the benefit of a 2-level reduction in his base
offense level under the Sentencing Guidelines.
On appeal, Lunceford complains that the district court erroneously included heroin
he personally consumed in the total drug weight and improperly relied on estimates of his
heroin distribution. First, the court’s thorough calculations reflect that, while the court did
use Lunceford’s personal heroin consumption to estimate how much heroin he needed to
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distribute in order to finance that consumption, the court included only the resulting
estimate of Lunceford’s heroin distribution, not his personal consumption, in the drug
weight. Indeed, at sentencing, the court explicitly noted that it did not incorporate the
heroin Lunceford personally used into the final drug quantity.
Second, our precedents and the Guidelines make clear that a trial court may, and
indeed often must, predicate its drug-weight finding on estimates. See United States v.
Cook, 76 F.3d 596, 604 (4th Cir. 1996) (stating that the Guidelines “permit estimated
amounts based on satisfactory evidence, and such estimates inherently possess a degree of
uncertainty” (internal quotation marks omitted)). In fact, the Guidelines state that where,
as here, “‘there is no drug seizure or the amount seized does not reflect the scale of the
offense, the court shall approximate the quantity of the controlled substance.’” Crawford,
734 F.3d at 342 (quoting U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Manual § 2D1.1 cmt. n.5 (2018)).
Further, in approximating the drug quantity for sentencing purposes, we have explained
that the district court may consider any relevant information, “provided that the information
has sufficient indicia of reliability to support its probable accuracy,” Crawford, 734 F.3d
at 342 (internal quotation marks omitted), including, for example, “the price generally
obtained for the controlled substance, financial or other records, [or] similar transactions
in controlled substances by the defendant,” USSG § 2D1.1 cmt. n.5. Put simply, the record
reveals that the district court carefully and conservatively calculated Lunceford’s estimated
heroin distribution using the available evidence, including similar transactions by
Lunceford’s codefendants and Lunceford’s own sales to a confidential informant. In these
circumstances, we are satisfied that the court did not clearly err.
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Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district court. We dispense with oral
argument because the facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials
before this court and argument would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED
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