Burden Essentially on Defendant to Disprove Prior Convictions

U.S. v. Martinez-Jimenez, 2006 WL 2789865 (9/29/06) - A helpful appellate procedural ruling, but a continuation of the 10th's less than vigilant review of the government's burden to prove convictions. The 10th held that it had to decide whether a criminal history point should have been assessed, even though the resultant criminal history category reduction would still yield a guideline range that included the defendant's sentence and the d.ct. imposed pre-Booker an identical alternative sentence. It was not clear the d.ct. would have imposed the same sentence if the guideline range was lower. But, the government had sufficiently proven the existence of a prior conviction by producing the NCIC record and a letter from the state court confirming the information in the NCIC with respect to one of the defendant's aliases. The government produced no judgment. The 10th strongly hinted that just the NCIC itself, (which is based on fingerprints, the 10th pointed out), was enough to meet the government's burden. Typically, the 10th stressed the defendant did not argue she was not the person to whom the documents referred, she did not introduce any evidence she had not been convicted of the crime in question and she did not attack the reliability of the letter or the NCIC reports. In this way, the burden in reality shifts to the defendant.