A sentencing decision out of the Eastern District of North Carolina carries a lesson worth the attention of every federal defendant in Raleigh. On August 14, 2026, the Fourth Circuit vacated a 48-month sentence in United States v. Franklin because the district court applied a two-level firearm enhancement without ever making findings to justify it. The defendant had not objected at sentencing. He won anyway.
The Case
Zerion Franklin worked at a Postal Service mail processing facility in Fayetteville. During a traffic stop, officers searched his car and found 48 United States Treasury checks — tax refunds, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits payable to other people. Forty-seven were in the trunk. One, altered to name his passenger as payee, sat in a backpack in the back seat along with marijuana, roughly $22,500 in cash, and a loaded handgun. Later stops and a home search turned up more checks and forgery tools. The intended loss exceeded $767,000.
Franklin pled guilty to mail theft by a postal employee and possession of stolen mail. His presentence report added two levels under Guidelines section 2B1.1(b)(16)(B), which applies when an offense involves possessing a dangerous weapon “in connection with the offense.” Nobody objected. The court adopted the report and imposed 48 months.
What “In Connection With” Requires
The Guidelines never define that phrase, and the Fourth Circuit had not construed it under this provision. Borrowing from its cases on the analogous firearms enhancement, the court held that “in connection with” means the weapon facilitated or had the potential to facilitate the offense. Presence by accident or coincidence does not count.
Applying that standard, the panel found the record wanting. On the theft count, nothing suggested a gun helped Franklin steal checks — his postal job gave him that access. On the possession count, the government argued the firearm protected valuable stolen checks because it shared a backpack with one. The court answered that physical proximity is not by itself enough. There was no evidence the stop happened late at night, that the checks were being guarded, or that any danger had arisen.
The court pointedly declined to hold the enhancement inapplicable as a matter of law. The problem was the absence of findings, not a ruling that no findings could support it. Judge Agee dissented, reasoning that a loaded handgun accompanying three-quarters of a million dollars in fungible checks obviously emboldened and protected the person carrying them.
The District Court’s Independent Duty
Here is the holding that matters most. A defendant’s failure to object does not relieve the sentencing court of its own obligation to calculate the Guidelines correctly. That duty includes making the factual findings an enhancement requires. Skipping them is procedural error — and, the court held, plain error, because the requirement is settled.
The Limits of the “I’d Impose the Same Sentence Anyway” Backstop
The most consequential part of the opinion concerns a practice familiar to anyone who sits through federal sentencings. District judges routinely announce that even if the Guidelines calculation is wrong, they would impose the identical sentence as an alternative variant sentence. That statement often insulates a sentence from reversal.
Not this time. The Fourth Circuit distinguished the leading cases on the ground that in those, the defendant had objected, the court engaged the arguments, and only then declared it would reach the same result. Franklin’s judge made the announcement without any indication it suspected a miscalculation and without explaining why 48 months would remain appropriate under a materially lower range. A blanket statement, standing alone, could not establish that the outcome would have been the same. As the court framed it, a judge may not shield a miscalculated range from meaningful appellate review by pronouncing, without justification, that the sentence would be identical regardless.
What This Means for Federal Defendants
Two practical points. First, an unobjected-to enhancement is not necessarily lost on appeal. Plain error review is demanding, but where the record contains no findings supporting an enhancement that added months to a sentence, the Fourth Circuit is willing to send the case back. Second, this is a reminder to scrutinize the presentence report line by line before sentencing rather than after. Franklin got relief, but only after serving time under a sentence built on a range that may have been six to eighteen months too high.
We have written previously about recent changes to the federal sentencing guidelines, about what the Guidelines cross-reference requires, and about Fourth Circuit revocation sentencing. Published opinions are posted at the court’s website.
Damon Chetson is a Board Certified Specialist in State and Federal Criminal Law and a member of the federal CJA panel in the Eastern District of North Carolina. If you are facing federal sentencing or believe your Guidelines range was miscalculated, contact The Chetson Firm in Raleigh.