United States v. Artis

22-2864
United States v. Artis
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT
SUMMARY ORDER
RULINGS BY SUMMARY ORDER DO NOT HAVE PRECEDENTIAL EFFECT. CITATION TO A SUM-
MARY ORDER FILED ON OR AFTER JANUARY 1, 2007, IS PERMITTED AND IS GOVERNED BY FED-
ERAL RULE OF APPELLATE PROCEDURE 32.1 AND THIS COURT’S LOCAL RULE 32.1.1. WHEN
CITING A SUMMARY ORDER IN A DOCUMENT FILED WITH THIS COURT, A PARTY MUST CITE
EITHER THE FEDERAL APPENDIX OR AN ELECTRONIC DATABASE (WITH THE NOTATION
“SUMMARY ORDER”). A PARTY CITING A SUMMARY ORDER MUST SERVE A COPY OF IT ON
ANY PARTY NOT REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL.
At a stated term of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, held at the
Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, 40 Foley Square, in the City of New York, on the
29th day of November, two thousand twenty-three.
Present:
DEBRA ANN LIVINGSTON,
Chief Judge,
DENNY CHIN,
MICHAEL H. PARK,
Circuit Judges.
_____________________________________
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Appellee,
v. 22-2864
JAMES WELCOME, MANDY BLANCHARD,
Defendants,
FLOYD ARTIS,
Defendant-Appellant.
_____________________________________
For Appellee: Paul J. Van de Graaf, Assistant U.S. Attorney (Gregory
L. Waples, on the brief) for Nikolas P. Kerest, U.S. At-
torney for the District of Vermont).
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For Defendant-Appellant: James M. Branden, Law Office of James M. Branden,
Staten Island, NY.
Appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Vermont
(Reiss, J.).
UPON DUE CONSIDERATION, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND
DECREED that the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
Defendant-Appellant Floyd Artis appeals from an October 25, 2022 judgment of the United
States District Court for the District of Vermont (Reiss, J.) revoking his supervised release and
sentencing him to 36 months’ imprisonment for violating the terms of his supervised release. On
appeal, Artis challenges the reasonableness of his within-Guidelines sentence. Specifically, he
contends that his sentence is substantively unreasonable and argues that the district court arrived
at the sentence by improperly focusing on the “seriousness” of his violations, rather than the
“breach of trust” they entailed. We assume the parties’ familiarity with the underlying facts, the
procedural history of the case, and the issues on appeal.
This Court reviews sentences for violations of supervised release for procedural and sub-
stantive reasonableness, the same standard applicable to the Court’s review of sentences generally.
United States v. McNeil, 415 F.3d 273, 277 (2d Cir. 2005). This inquiry entails “a particularly
deferential form of abuse-of-discretion review.” United States v. Broxmeyer, 699 F.3d 265, 278
(2d Cir. 2012). We find procedural error where the district court erred in the procedure used to
arrive at the sentence. United States v. Johnson, 567 F.3d 40, 51 (2d Cir. 2009). We find sub-
stantive error “only ‘for those few cases that, although procedurally correct, would nonetheless
damage the administration of justice because the sentence imposed was shockingly high, shock-
ingly low, or otherwise unsupportable as a matter of law.’” United States v. Eaglin, 913 F.3d 88,
94 (2d Cir. 2019) (citation omitted).
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Under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3), a judge imposing a sentence for a violation of supervised
release must consider the factors enumerated in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), including “the need for the
sentence imposed . . . to reflect the seriousness of the offense.” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(2)(A). This
Court “take[s] a deferential approach” in our review of a district court’s compliance and “refrain[s]
from imposing any rigorous requirement of specific articulation by the sentencing judge.” United
States v. Fleming, 397 F.3d 95, 99 (2d Cir. 2005). Therefore, we will not assume that a court
failed to account for a relevant factor, absent indications to the contrary, simply because it did not
cite it explicitly. See United States v. Verkhoglyad, 516 F.3d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 2008).
Artis argues that the district court erred in imposing its sentence by improperly focusing
on the seriousness of Artis’s violation conduct—the seriousness of which Artis concedes—rather
than the breach of trust that his conduct entailed. In support of his legal claim, Artis relies pri-
marily on a concurrence in United States v. Hammond, 139 S. Ct. 2369 (2019), for the proposition
that the consequences of violating supervised release pertain “first and foremost” to the defend-
ant’s “breach of trust,” rather than the conduct triggering revocation. Id. at 2386 (Breyer, J.,
concurring). We have said that ‘“the primary goal of a revocation sentence’ ought to be ‘to sanc-
tion the violator for failing to abide by the conditions of the court-ordered supervision,’ in order to
account for the breach of trust inherent in failing to appreciate the privileges associated with such
supervision.” United States v. Sindima, 488 F.3d 81, 86 (2d Cir. 2007) (citing U.S.S.G. §
7A.3(b)).
Here, the district court did not err. At the start, the record indicates that during the revo-
cation hearing, the district court appropriately considered the applicable § 3553(a) sentencing fac-
tors by specifically enumerating and accounting for them. See Fleming, 397 F.3d at 97. Insofar
as a sentencing court must consider “seriousness” among those factors, the court’s assessment of
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this metric complied with its statutory mandate. And considering that Artis’s violations included,
inter alia, flight, drug possession—including with the intent to distribute—and possession of a
handgun without permission, the district court’s consideration of this factor unsurprisingly reflects
the seriousness of the violations.
The district court also addressed and accounted for Artis’s breach of trust, meaning the
“degree to which [Artis’s] violation[s] represent[] a serious betrayal of the court’s trust.” See
Verkhoglyad, 516 F.3d at 136. At the revocation of supervised release hearing, the court re-
counted a verbal exchange with Artis during his earlier compassionate release hearing to under-
score that the court placed trust in Artis that he subsequently breached:
I told him, look, you don’t have a ton of time left, but the judge puts their neck out
there when they grant you compassionate release and you go into the community
ahead of time, and we had a very frank conversation about how is that going to
happen? Are you going to be compliant? I heard, absolutely.
The district court’s additional assessment that Artis’s conduct upon release amounted to a “chart
topper” in terms of the magnitude and multitude of violations indicates the degree of Artis’s breach
of trust. The district court’s careful analysis, including its assessment of the seriousness of the
violations, placed Artis’s “conduct in context to determine the extent to which it reflected a be-
trayal of the court’s trust”—an assessment that informed its resulting sentence. See Verkhoglyad,
516 F.3d at 132.
Nor is the within-Guidelines sentence imposed by the district court substantively unrea-
sonable. Although this Court has declined to adopt a presumption that a within-Guidelines sen-
tence is reasonable, “[i]n the overwhelming majority of cases, a Guidelines sentence will fall com-
fortably within the broad range of sentences that would be reasonable in the particular circum-
stances.” United States v. Bryant, 976 F.3d 165, 181 (2d Cir. 2020) (quoting United States v.
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Fernandez, 443 F.3d 19, 27 (2d Cir. 2006)). The district court’s 36-month sentence, which falls
within the Guidelines range, is not “shockingly high” in light of the factors cited by the district
court. United States v. Rigas, 583 F.3d 108, 123 (2d Cir. 2009). As the district court itself
noted, this sentence accounted for the § 3553(a) factors “in an effort to impose a sentence that is
sufficient, but not greater than necessary.” Artis provides no countervailing considerations be-
yond those addressed above and his assertion that the sentence falls near the top of the Guidelines
range. In view of our conclusion that the relevant factors do not render this an “exceptional”
case, we lack a basis upon which to find the sentence substantively unreasonable. See United
States v. Cavera, 550 F.3d 180, 189 (2008).
* * *
We have considered Artis’s remaining arguments and conclude that they lack merit. We
therefore AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.
FOR THE COURT:
Catherine O’Hagan Wolfe, Clerk of Court
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