United States of America v. Arnold Russell Threet

UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 15-4118
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff – Appellee,
v.
ARNOLD RUSSELL THREET,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of
Maryland, at Baltimore. Catherine C. Blake, Chief District
Judge. (1:14-cr-00020-CCB-1)
Submitted: September 22, 2015 Decided: November 5, 2015
Before KING, DIAZ, and HARRIS, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
Andrew R. Szekely, LAW OFFICE OF ANDREW R. SZEKELY, LLC,
Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellant. Rod J. Rosenstein, United
States Attorney, Bonnie S. Greenberg, Assistant United States
Attorney, Michael Elliker, Student Law Clerk, Baltimore,
Maryland, for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.

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PER CURIAM:
Arnold Threet pleaded guilty, pursuant to a written plea
agreement, to committing bank robbery, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§ 2113 (2012). The district court sentenced Threet to 120
months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release.
On appeal, Threet contends that the district court abused its
discretion by varying upward from his applicable Sentencing
Guidelines range. We affirm.
We review a sentence’s substantive reasonableness under a
“deferential abuse-of-discretion standard.” United States v.
Washington, 743 F.3d 938, 943-44 (4th Cir. 2014). We “must
defer to the district court and affirm a reasonable sentence,
even if we would have imposed something different.” Id. at
943-44. When faced with a variant sentence, we “consider
whether the sentencing court acted reasonably both with respect
to its decision to impose such a sentence and with respect to
the extent of the divergence from the sentencing range.” Id. at
944 (internal quotation marks omitted).
A variant sentence “carries no presumption of
unreasonableness.” Irizarry v. United States, 553 U.S. 708, 713
(2007). Even a significant variance from the Guidelines range
“does not alone render [a variant sentence] presumptively
unreasonable.” United States v. Hargrove, 701 F.3d 156, 163
(4th Cir. 2012) (internal quotation mark omitted). While the

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extent of the variance is relevant, we must “give due deference
to the district court’s decision that the [18 U.S.C.] § 3553(a)
factors, on the whole, justify the extent of the variance.”
Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 51 (2007).
After reviewing the record, we conclude that the district
court did not abuse its discretion either in varying upward or
in the extent of its variance from Threet’s Guidelines range.
Threet committed a serious offense, has an extensive criminal
history that was not accounted for in his Guidelines range, and
has demonstrated a propensity to commit robbery when faced with
recurring bouts of substance abuse. The district court properly
cited the need to protect the public due to individual factors
not sufficiently accounted for by the Guidelines. We thus find
no reversible error in the district court’s sentence.
Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s judgment. We
dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal
contentions are adequately presented in the materials before
this court and argument would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED

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