Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Gustavo Salas-Romero was convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas of illegal reentry under 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a) and (b). He appealed, raising for the first time on appeal a constitutional challenge to the sentencing enhancement provision in § 1326(b). Salas-Romero acknowledged that his argument was foreclosed by existing precedent but sought to preserve the issue for possible Supreme Court review.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit granted the government’s motion for summary affirmance, affirming the district court’s judgment without full briefing. The court held that Salas-Romero’s constitutional argument was entirely foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224 (1998). Under Almendarez-Torres, judges retain a narrow exception to Sixth Amendment requirements, permitting them to find only the fact of a prior conviction to support a sentence enhancement.
The court cited Erlinger v. United States, 602 U.S. 821 (2024), which reaffirmed that the Almendarez-Torres exception persists as a limited carve-out to the rule established in Blakely and Alleyne. Because Salas-Romero’s challenge directly conflicted with this established precedent, summary affirmance was appropriate.
Key Takeaways
- The Almendarez-Torres exception remains viable law: judges may constitutionally find a prior conviction fact without submitting it to a jury.
- Defendants cannot circumvent sentencing enhancement provisions in illegal reentry statutes through Sixth Amendment challenges when those enhancements depend solely on prior conviction findings.
- Raising a foreclosed constitutional argument for the first time on appeal does not preserve it for Supreme Court review if circuit precedent clearly bars the claim.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the narrow boundaries of Sixth Amendment protections in sentencing after Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Alleyne. The Almendarez-Torres carve-out for prior conviction findings remains a significant limitation on defendants’ ability to challenge sentence enhancements, particularly in immigration-related offenses like illegal reentry.
For practitioners, the case underscores that challenges to sentencing enhancements based on prior convictions will face an uphill constitutional battle in the circuit courts. Defendants must typically challenge the factual basis or proof of the prior conviction itself, not the constitutionality of allowing a judge to apply the enhancement based on that conviction.