Whether the Ninth Circuit has sanctioned serial departures by the district court from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings

QUESTION PRESENTED Throughout three cycles of 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) proceedings, the district court has denied Raymond Mendez a reduction to his life sentence based on the drug quantity finding at the core of this appeal. But through a series of procedural flukes, both the protean nature of that finding and its evidentiary basis have evaded real scrutiny: e On direct appeal, with a due process challenge at stake, the Ninth Circuit described the finding as modest: an amount “sufficient to meet the requirements for offense level 38” under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. e Yet when Mendez later appealed the denial of his first § 3582(c)(2) motion, a Ninth Circuit screening panel described the finding as far more aggressive: an amount over 90 times greater than the threshold for offense level 38. e That panel’s unreasoned ruling, in turn, has since been used as law of the case—enabling the district court to continue to recharacterize its initial finding in terms that satisfy each newly amended threshold for the same offense level. The question presented is whether the Ninth Circuit has thus sanctioned serial departures by the district court so far from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings as to call for an exercise of this Court’s supervisory power. U.S. Sup. Ct. R. 10(a). ii CONTENTS STATUTORY PROVISIONS INVOLVED .ececes