United States v. Robert Alan Starr

Defendant Robert Alan Starr was sentenced to eighty-seven months in federal prison under the Sentencing Guidelines upon conviction on three counts of bank robbery. Starr appeals his sentence, arguing that the district court (1) improperly relied upon an unadjudicated probation violation as a basis for upward departure; (2) failed to provide adequate notice that it would also base the upward departure on two prior convictions not considered in the calculation of his criminal history score; (3) failed to consider the similarity of these “remote” offenses to the bank robberies that are the subject of this case; and (4) departed to an unreasonable extent because the analogy the court drew between Starr’s actual criminal record and Guidelines criminal history category IV was inac curate. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3742 , and we affirm.

I

Between January and March of 1988 defendant Robert Alan Starr committed ten bank robberies in California. He was indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of California for seven of the robberies on April 15, 1988. Shortly thereafter, Starr consented to the filing of an information charging him with the three others, which…