Case: 19-11200 Date Filed: 04/24/2020 Page: 1 of 8 [DO NOT PUBLISH] IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT ________________________ No. 19-11200 Non-Argument Calendar ________________________ D.C. Docket No. 0:18-cr-60231-CMA-1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, versus TONY DEVON SPELLS, Defendant-Appellant. ________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida ________________________ (April 24, 2020) Before WILLIAM PRYOR, MARTIN, and JILL PRYOR, Circuit Judges. PER CURIAM: Tony Spells appeals his 48-month sentence for making a false statement in information required to be kept in the records of a licensed firearm dealer. He Case: 19-11200 Date Filed: 04/24/2020 Page: 2 of 8 argues that the district court miscalculated his base offense level under the United States Sentencing Guidelines and that his sentence is disproportionately harsher than sentences imposed on other defendants convicted of making false statements. 1 After careful review, we affirm. I. In April 2018, Spells applied to purchase a firearm at a pawn shop in Fort Lauderdale. On the paperwork for purchase, Spells indicated that he had never been convicted of a felony. At the time, however, Spells had at least seven felony convictions and knew he was a convicted felon. The pawn shop submitted Spells’s paperwork to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which denied Spells’s application to buy a firearm. In December 2018, a superseding indictment charged Spells with making a false statement to a federally licensed firearm dealer in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(6) and knowingly making a false statement in information required to be kept in the records of a federally licensed firearm dealer in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1 In his reply brief, Spells argues that his plea was involuntary and his indictment was defective. In support, he cites Rehaif v. United States, 588 U.S. ___, 139 S. Ct. 2191 (2019). Because Spells did not raise these arguments in his initial brief (filed after Rehaif was decided), the government moved to strike Spells’s reply brief. This Court granted that motion. For this reason, we do not consider these arguments. See Tallahassee Mem’l Reg’l Med. Ctr. v. Bowen, 815 F.2d 1435, 1446 n.16 (11th Cir. 1987) (“It is well settled that a party cannot argue an issue in its reply brief that was not preserved in its initial brief.”). 2 Case: 19-11200 Date Filed: 04/24/2020 Page: 3 of 8 § 924(a)(1)(A). In January 2019, Spells pled guilty to the second count before a magistrate judge, and the district court accepted his plea. Before Spells was sentenced, the Probation Office prepared a presentence investigation report (“PSR”). The PSR described Spells’s criminal history, including two Florida domestic-violence-related convictions from 2003 and 2010. The PSR also noted that Spells was served with two temporary domestic-violence injunctions related to these convictions, as well as four domestic-violence injunctions stemming from other incidents. On this basis, the PSR assigned Spells a criminal history category of IV. The PSR determined that Guideline § 2K2.1 governed Spells’s offense and assigned Spells a base level offense ...
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