Unexplained Upward Departure in Fraud Case Was Harmless Error

A bookkeeper sentenced to almost eight years in prison for wire fraud won’t be resentenced based on the court’s alleged failure to adequately explain its upward criminal history departure, because it was harmless error, a federal appeals court ruled in an unpublished opinion.

"[A]ny error in a district court’s failure to adequately explain the departure is harmless if the district court would have imposed the same sentence as a variance anyway,” the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said.

Even if the trial court’s failure to discuss each criminal history category it rejected was erroneous, it was harmless ...