Sentencing; The First Step Act (the Act); The Fair Sentencing Act; United States v. Beamus; United States v. Blewett; Sentence “modification”; United States v. Alexander; 18 USC § 3582(c)(1)(B); United States v. Hegewood (5th Cir.); Fed.R.Crim.P. 43(b)(4); Whether § 3582(c)(2) requires a plenary sentencing procedure; Dillon v. United States; Pepper v. United States; United States v. Allen; United States v. Flack; United States v. Payton (ED MI); United States v. Curry (4th Cir.); United States v. Hamilton (7th Cir.); United States v. Williams (8th Cir.); Whether the sentence was “unreasonable” where the district court used a modified Form AO 247 form to explain its decision; United States v. Bowers; Rita v. United States; Gall v. United States; Chavez-Meza v. United States

[This appeal was from the WD-MI.] The court held that resentencing under the First Step Act does not require the district court to conduct a plenary sentencing procedure, and that its use of a sentencing form order was not procedurally unreasonable. Defendant-Smith was convicted of several drug and firearm charges. The district court initially sentenced him to 360 months on the first 2 counts, but then became aware of the mandatory life sentence under the then-applicable guidelines and sentenced him accordingly. Smith later moved for a sentence reduction under the First Step Act. The district court reduced his sentence for the 2 counts to 360 months, to run concurrently to his unchanged 360-month sentence for the powder-cocaine count. It did not conduct a new sentencing hearing and instead used a modified AO 247 order form titled “Order Regarding Motion for Sentence Reduction Pursuant to” § 3582(c)(1). The parties agreed that the Act applied to the first two drug counts, but Smith argued that the district court should have conducted a full sentencing hearing and applied the First Step Act reduction to all of his sentences. The court noted that it has treated sentence modifications under the First Step Act and “§ 3582(c)(1)(B) as analogous to sentence modifications based on” § 3582(c)(2), and cited various cases from other circuits and Dillon for their holdings that “§ 3582(c)(2) authorizes ‘only a limited adjustment to an otherwise final sentence and not a plenary resentencing proceeding[.]’” Thus, the court held that Smith was not entitled to a new hearing. He also argued that his sentence was procedurally unreasonable where the district court used a modified Form AO 247 when resentencing him that he asserted did not adequately explain the reasoning behind the 360-month sentence. However, the Supreme Court has previously accepted the use of a form in a USSG sentencing modification, and the court followed suit with the First Step Act. It also noted that the district court had originally sentenced Smith to 360 months before it was made aware of the required mandatory life sentence, and had adequately explained its reasoning at the initial sentencing hearing. Because the district court sentenced Smith at the bottom of the USSG range in both the initial sentencing and in the sentence modification, its use of the form fell within the sentencing judge’s “lawful professional judgment.” Affirmed.