United States v. Chiasson

In United States v. Chiasson, —-F. 4th —-, No. 23-30053 (5th Cir. Jan. 12, 2024), the Fifth Circuit affirmed the defendant’s above-Guideline sentence after finding that the district court did not err at sentencing by considering testimony by two non-victim witnesses or by relying on what the defendant characterized as “bare arrests.”

Ruling 1: Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32 lists classes of people whom a district court must allow to testify at sentencing, but it does not indicate that only those classes of people can testify.  And a district court has broad discretion to receive evidence for the purpose of imposing an appropriate sentence.  See 18 U.S.C. § 3661 (“No limitation shall be placed on the information … which a court of the United States may receive and consider”).  It was not error for the district court to allow two non-victim Government witnesses to testify in this case.

Ruling 2: A sentencing court may not rely on “bare” arrest records, which the Fifth Circuit defines as those that include only “the mere fact of an arrest—i.e. the date, charge, jurisdiction and disposition—without corresponding information about the underlying facts or circumstances regarding the defendant’s conduct that led to the arrest.”  Here, the PSR and the Government’s witnesses both referred to bare arrest records, but the defendant failed to show that the district court relied on any of those references.  Instead, the court only mentioned arrests that had sufficient factual support in the PSR such that they were not bare arrest records.