UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, │ Plaintiff-Appellee, │ > No. 20-5905 │ v. │ │ RODNEY HYMES, │ Defendant-Appellant. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee of Chattanooga. No. 1:17-cr-00043-1—Curtis L. Collier, District Judge.

Decided and Filed: December 3, 2021

Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; SILER and READLER, Circuit Judges. _________________

COUNSEL ON BRIEF: Jennifer Niles Coffin, FEDERAL DEFENDER SERVICES OF EASTERN TENNESSEE, INC., Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Brian Samuelson, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellee. _________________

OPINION _________________

CHAD A. READLER, Circuit Judge. Rodney Hymes pleaded guilty to possessing crack cocaine with the intent to distribute. The district court initially sentenced Hymes to 188 months of imprisonment. But while Hymes’s appeal was pending, we decided United States v. Havis, 927 F.3d 382 (6th Cir. 2019) (en banc) (per curiam), which cast doubt over the district court’s reading of the Sentencing Guidelines in Hymes’s case. Accordingly, we vacated Hymes’s sentence and remanded for resentencing in light of Havis. The district court then resentenced No. 20-5905 United States v. Hymes Page 2

Hymes to a within-Guidelines sentence of 124 months of imprisonment. On appeal, Hymes finds fault with numerous aspects of the district court’s sentencing analysis, including its failure to defer to national sentencing data accumulated by the Sentencing Commission. But as the district court was not required to even consider that data (let alone defer to it), and seeing no other basis to disrupt Hymes’s sentence, we affirm.

BACKGROUND

Following an investigation into Rodney Hymes’s drug trafficking activities, Chattanooga police officers confronted Hymes as he was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot. Hymes attempted to escape by ramming a police car. Eventually, officers arrested Hymes and recovered a wide swath of narcotics from his car. A search of Hymes’s home unearthed even more drugs. In total, officers seized 43 grams of crack cocaine, among other drugs. A grand jury indicted Hymes on five different federal drugs and weapons charges. In exchange for dismissal of the remaining charges, Hymes pleaded guilty to one count of possession with the intent to distribute crack cocaine in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and (b)(1)(C).

At Hymes’s sentencing, much of the focus was on his numerous prior state criminal convictions. They included nearly a dozen motor vehicle offenses, a conviction for evading arrest and theft under $500, another conviction for failing to appear, and two convictions for attempting to possess cocaine for resale. Under then-existing circuit precedent, the latter two convictions put Hymes squarely within the ambit of U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1’s career offender provision, which automatically establishes a criminal h