United States v. Collins

UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 04-4786
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff - Appellee,
versus
VERNON A. COLLINS,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of
Maryland, at Baltimore. Catherine C. Blake, District Judge. (CR-
87-338-HAR)
Submitted: March 14, 2005 Decided: January 10, 2006
Before WIDENER, MICHAEL, and MOTZ, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
James Wyda, Federal Public Defender, Sarah S. Gannett, Staff
Attorney, Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellant. Allen F. Loucks,
United States Attorney, Jonathan M. Mastrangelo, Assistant United
States Attorney, Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
See Local Rule 36(c).
PER CURIAM:
Vernon A. Collins appeals his thirty-five year sentence,
imposed after we remanded in part his appeal from an order denying
his motion under former Fed. R. Crim. P. 35.
We determined that Collins’s two convictions and
sentences under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) (1982) violated the rule in
United States v. Ball, 470 U.S. 865 (1985). See United States v.
Collins, 2005 WL 857231 at *1 (4th Cir. 2004). We therefore
directed the district court to vacate one of Collins’s convictions
and resentence him consistent with our opinion.
On resentencing, Collins moved the district court to
reconsider whether he should receive a sentence enhancement under
18 U.S.C. § 924(e) (1982). Collins argued he did not have three
requisite predicate convictions because he had been unlawfully
denied access to an attorney during a juvenile waiver proceeding
for one of the offenses, in violation of Gideon v. Wainwright, 372
U.S. 335 (1963). The district court denied Collins’s motion
because it found it was constrained by our mandate not to consider
this issue.
“Few legal precepts are as firmly established as the
doctrine that the mandate of a higher court is ‘controlling as to
matters within its compass.’” United States v. Bell, 5 F.3d 64, 66
(4th Cir. 1993) (quoting Sprague v. Ticonic Nat’l Bank, 307 U.S.
161, 168 (1939)). That is, a district court must abide by the
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mandate of an appeals court and may not consider questions resolved
by that mandate. Bell, 5 F.3d at 66. When a district court
engages in further proceedings related to the matter resolved by
the appellate court, the district court must follow both the letter
and the spirit of the mandate, taking into account the appellate
court’s opinion and the circumstances it embraces. Id. at 66-67.
We conclude the district court did not err when it found
that our mandate prevented it from reconsidering Collins’s § 924(e)
enhancement. We also conclude that Collins’s argument does not
meet an exception to the mandate rule. Id. at 67. Collins has
failed to establish that the right to collaterally attack his state
convictions during federal sentencing based on lack of counsel did
not exist at the time of his sentence. See Burgett v. Texas, 389
U.S. 109 (1967); United States v. Tucker, 404 U.S. 443 (1972). Nor
was his sentence affected by Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. __,
124 S. Ct. 2531 (2004).
Accordingly, we affirm Collins’s sentence. We dispense
with oral argument because the facts and legal contentions are
adequately presented in the materials before the court and argument
would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED
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