United States v. Mauricio Ortega-Cazares

MEMORANDUM

Mauricio Ortega-Cazares challenges the 40-month prison sentence imposed following his guilty plea for being a removed alien found in the United States, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326 . We affirm.

This is Ortega-Cazares’s second appeal of his sentence. He was initially sentenced to 40 months in prison and a two-year term of supervised release. That sentence rested, in large part, on a 16-level ' enhancement under U.S.S.G. § 2L1.2(b)(l)(A)(ii) for Ortega-Cazares’s having previously been convicted of a crime of violence — namely, a 2009 New York conviction for attempted second-degree assault. While Ortega-Cazares’s appeal was still pending, this court granted the parties’ joint motion to vacate his sentence due to the government’s failure to provide the district court with any documentation specifying the statutory basis for Ortega-Cazares’s New York conviction. Such proof is required to justify the § 2L1.2(b)(l)(A)(ii) enhancement.

At resentencing, the government provided additional documentation in the form of the transcript from Ortega-Cazares’s change-of-plea hearing in state court, the New York indictment, and a certificate of disposition. The district court again…