After a long hiatus, I am back blogging. If there's anyone who actually reads this blog, I would suggest heading to Professor Berman's blog and the Tenth Circuit blog to catch up on the blog backlog. At any rate, the Tenth issued an interesting sentencing decision today in US v. Servin-Acosta.

The defendant argued that his prior conviction for robbery was not sufficient to be considered a crime of violence under the sentencing guidelines. In short, he argued that the district court erred by relying on a minute entry of his prior conviction and that the evidence offered at sentencing was insufficient to establish that his prior robbery conviction was for the crime of generic robbery, as required by 2L1.2.

The Tenth rejects the defendant's argument that a minute entry is insufficient, noting that the United States also furnished the district court with two immigration reports from the defendant's deportation proceedings. Because the defendant failed, however, to present any evidence to contradict the prior conviction, the court holds that the government met its burden and the documentation provided was sufficiently reliable.

The Tenth does find merit in the defendant's contention that the California robbery statute is broader than the definition of generic robbery utilized by the guidelines. As the court notes, "[a] State's designation of a criminal provision as its 'robbery' statute does not necessarily mean that it qualifies as "robbery" under 2L1.2." Instead, the court adopted a "uniform generic definition" of robbery, and concluded that the California statute could encompass a broader range of conduct than "generic robbery." The Tenth further observed that the government "has conceded that second-degree robbery in California is broader than generic robbery, and it has presented no evidence that Mr. Servin-Acosta's specific offense was generic robbery. It simply put all its eggs in one defective basket..." The court remanded the case for further sentencing proceedings.