New Sentencing Hearing
Forensic DNA keeps a Fort Hood attack conviction alive
The Fifth Circuit said the evidence was enough to support an attempted-murder verdict from the 2000 assault on M.M. But it ordered a new sentencing hearing after finding the judge used the wrong guideline manual.
A federal appeals court kept Allen Houston James’s conviction from a 2000 Fort Hood attack, but threw out the 200-month sentence. The panel said the wrong version of the sentencing guidelines drove the punishment.
- Conviction upheld in a 2000 Fort Hood cold case
- Forensic genealogy helped lead investigators back to Allen Houston James
- Sentence vacated because the wrong sentencing guidelines were used
- Case returns to the Western District of Texas for resentencing
- In the Fifth Circuit, a Fort Hood cold case ended with one clean win for prosecutors and one for Allen Houston James
In the Fifth Circuit, a Fort Hood cold case ended with one clean win for prosecutors and one for Allen Houston James. The court left his attempted-murder conviction in place after forensic genealogy, a family-tree style DNA search, and semen found on M.M.’s mattress cover pointed investigators back to him in a 2000 sexual assault and stabbing, but it sent the case back for resentencing.
Jurors could infer an intent to kill from the violence of the attack, the panel said, including repeated knife wounds and stab injuries to the neck that missed major blood vessels by only a few millimeters. James also lost his challenge to the jury instructions because the language he complained about was material he had asked for.
The wrong guideline book
The sentencing error was the part that did not survive. The district court used the 2023 Sentencing Guidelines Manual even though the 1998 version applied to the crime in the Western District of Texas.
That mattered because the later manual increased James’s advisory range before the judge varied upward to 200 months in prison, plus three years of supervised release. The panel vacated the sentence and ordered a new look at punishment, not at the conviction itself.