US v. Roy, No. 21-4312 (4th Cir. 2023)
Annotate this CaseThe United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the decision of the United States District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, sentencing Joshua Aaron Roy to 120 months imprisonment and five years of supervised release for unlawful possession of a firearm and aiding and abetting possession with intent to distribute at least 40 grams of fentanyl. The court rejected Roy's claim that his sentence was procedurally unreasonable, holding that the district court did not rely on clearly erroneous facts or evidence outside the record. The specifics of the case involved Roy driving his stepdaughter and her partner in the latter's vehicle, suspected by law enforcement to be transporting narcotics. Following a traffic stop, the officers seized 447 fentanyl capsules weighing 61.98 grams from the partner. Roy was subsequently arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm after being identified on surveillance footage following a report of shoplifting. The court found that the district court's statements about the lethality of fentanyl and the connection between the two offenses constituted permissible reliance on facts within the record. It concluded that any error in the reference to multiple firearms did not alter the court's understanding that Roy had possessed a single firearm and was therefore harmless.
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