Whether the district court's reliance on a clearly erroneous fact in selecting the defendant's sentence was harmless error

QUESTION PRESENTED The district court expressly and repeatedly explained that it selected Mr. Samayoa-Castillo’s 60-month, total sentence in consideration of the “substantial” and “significant” nature of the 15-month “break” it erroneously believed it awarded Mr. Samayoa-Castillo in 2016. In reality it awarded Mr. Samayoa-Castillo a “break” of less than three months. It is undisputed that the district court relied on upon this clearly erroneous fact in selecting Mr. Samayoa-Castillo’s total sentence in 2018. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (1) acknowledged that the district court committed procedural error when it relied on the incorrect 2016 guideline range in imposing the 2018 sentences; but (2) found that the error was harmless because there was another basis in the record for determining that “another below-guideline sentence was unwarranted.” The issue before this Court is: When the district court expressly relies upon a clearly erroneous fact in selecting its sentence, is the error harmless if there are other factors in the record that would support the overall sentence? Did the Eleventh Circuit misapply harmless error review under Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(a) in a manner that is contrary this Court’s precedent announced in Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38 (2007), Williams v. United States, 503 U.S. 198, 203 (1992), MolinaMartinez v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1338 (2016), and Rosales-Mireles v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 1897 (2018)? ii