United States Ninth Circuit

On remand to the district court for the limited purpose of determining defendant's eligibility for the Residential Drug Abuse Program's (RDAP) sentence reduction, the Bureau of Prison's (BOP) decision not to admit defendant into the RDAP pursuant to their 2009 RDAP rule and the district court's judgment that it lacked jurisdiction to review defendant's challenge to his denial of eligibility are dismissed, reversed, and remanded, where: 1) the district court did not lack jurisdiction, as defendant made a categorical challenge to the BOP's interpretation of its own regulation; 2) defendant's claims regarding the legality of the 2009 RDAP rule are rendered moot by the intervening decision to admit defendant into the RDAP; and 3) the BOP's conflation of kidnapping with unlawful restraint was arbitrary and capricious, and resulted in the unlawful denial of defendant's eligibility for sentence reduction.

Appellate Information

• Decided 10/27/2014
• Published 10/27/2014

Judges

• Gould

Court

• United States Ninth Circuit

Counsel