Background
Tristan Murphy pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery. At his original sentencing, the district court assigned him two criminal-history points for prior convictions and two additional points because he committed the offense while on probation. His total of four points placed him in criminal-history category III, producing a Guidelines range of 30 to 37 months. The court imposed 37 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
While on supervised release, Murphy was found in West Virginia with three firearms, marijuana, and cash. After he separately pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, the Michigan district court found that he had committed three supervised-release violations. At the revocation hearing, both sides favored applying Amendment 821, which had changed the treatment of offenses committed while under a criminal-justice sentence and would have reduced Murphy’s criminal-history category to II. The district court instead retained category III, calculated an 18-to-24-month range, and imposed an 18-month sentence consecutive to Murphy’s 35-month West Virginia sentence.
The Court’s Holding
The Sixth Circuit affirmed. It first held that Murphy adequately preserved his objection by expressing agreement with the government’s request to use the lower criminal-history category, particularly because the district court addressed and decided the issue. The court therefore reviewed the legal question de novo rather than for plain error.
The panel agreed that the district court’s stated method—deferring immediately to Application Note 1 to U.S.S.G. § 7C1.5 without first applying the interpretive analysis required by United States v. Riccardi—was incorrect. But the panel affirmed on a different ground: § 7C1.5’s text unambiguously requires use of the criminal-history category that applied when the defendant was originally sentenced to supervised release. Applying that category did not conflict with § 1B1.11(a), because the current Guidelines Manual itself contains that instruction. Amendment 821 therefore did not reduce Murphy’s category for this revocation sentence, and he was not entitled to resentencing.
Key Takeaways
- For Murphy’s supervised-release revocation, § 7C1.5 required the district court to use criminal-history category III, the category applicable at his original sentencing.
- The district court should not have deferred to Guidelines commentary before determining whether the operative text was genuinely ambiguous, but that analytical error did not change the result.
- The panel treated Murphy’s brief request to “go with the lower number” as sufficient to preserve the issue because it adopted the government’s position in context and the district court ruled on the merits.
Why It Matters
The decision explains that using a defendant’s original criminal-history category at revocation is an application of the current Guidelines Manual, not an impermissible use of an outdated manual. It also illustrates that an appellate court may affirm a sentence on the text of the applicable policy statement even when the district court used an improper commentary-deference analysis.
Because the opinion is designated “Not Recommended for Publication,” practitioners should not characterize it as categorically establishing binding Sixth Circuit precedent. It nevertheless provides the panel’s detailed textual analysis of why Amendment 821 did not alter Murphy’s criminal-history category in this revocation proceeding.