In a precedential ruling on Thursday, the three-judge appellate panel sent Tyrone Mitchell's case back to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania so the court can resentence him for a 17-count conviction that included charges of possessing and distributing crack, cocaine and PCP and of possessing a firearm.
There was one glaring problem for the appellate panel in reviewing the case — the trial judge cited Mitchell's arrest record during the sentencing, according to the opinion.
While the Third Circuit left untouched a jury's October 2015 conviction of Mitchell on the charges, the court determined that U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond went against the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution in the way he used Mitchell's arrest record, according to the opinion.
"In determining a sentence, although a court can mention a defendant's record of prior arrests that did not lead to conviction, it cannot rely on such a record," the opinion reads.
Judge Diamond had interrupted the prosecutor as he spoke during sentencing, specifying that the judge understood that the record for Mitchell, who was 50 at the time, included six adult convictions, seven adjudications and 18 other arrests, according to the opinion.
"This is as long and serious of [a] criminal record as I've seen in 12 and a half years on the bench," Thursday's opinion quotes Judge Diamond as stating during sentencing.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania declined to comment, said Jennifer Crandall, a spokeswoman for the office, to Law360 on Friday.
Counsel for Mitchell could not be reached for comment on Friday.
Mitchell received separate sentences of 360, 300, 300, 240, 120 and 60 months for the various counts he was convicted of, according to the opinion. Of those, Judge Diamond ordered that the 360-, 300-, 300- and 60-month sentences should run consecutively, rather than concurrently, according to the opinion.
The Third Circuit disagreed with the federal government's assertion that Judge Diamond had simply noticed that Mitchell had been arrested several times without being convicted, but rather had "'bridge[d] the gap between reference and reliance' and ... shown plain error," according to the opinion, which quoted the appellate court's November 2017 ruling in U.S. v. Ferguson
.The appellate court also noted that in Judge Diamond's statement of reasons that accompanied his sentence, he only stated that Mitchell's "extensive criminal history" was the rationale for the 85-year sentence, rather than making a differentiation between arrests, adjudications and convictions.
"Looking at the record below in its entirety, we conclude that the district court improperly relied on Mitchell's bare arrest record in determining his sentence," the opinion reads.
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--Editing by Katherine Rautenberg.
Update: This article has been updated to include a decline to comment by a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.