United States v. Ibarra-Luna

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge:

In United States v. Morales-Sanchez, we held that a district court must always “correctly calculate] the applicable Guidelines range” before imposing a sentence. 1 Today we address whether a sentence may be upheld if an error in the calculation is shown to be harmless. We hold that under the discretionary sentenc ing regime of Booker and progeny, 2 the harmless error doctrine applies only if the proponent of the sentence convincingly demonstrates both (1) that the district court would have imposed the same sentence had it not made the error, and (2) that…