Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-10-01718/USCOURTS-ca7-10-01718-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
William S. Kirkpatrick
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted July 9, 2010∗

 Decided July 20, 2010

Before

FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge

DIANE S. SYKES, Circuit Judge

No. 10-1718

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

WILLIAM S. KIRKPATRICK,

Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United 

States District Court for the 

Southern District of Illinois.

No. 08-cr-30257-1-DRH

David R. Herndon, 

Chief Judge.

Order

Our prior opinion concluded that, before giving an above-Guideline sentence, 

the district court should first determine what sentence the Guidelines would 

recommend if the defendant had been convicted of the additional criminal conduct that 

led the judge to think a higher sentence appropriate. 598 F.3d 414 (2009).

On remand, the district court sentenced Kirkpatrick to 78 months’ imprisonment. 

(The original sentence had been 108 months.) Kirkpatrick has appealed again, 

 

∗ This successive appeal has been submitted to the original panel under Operating Procedure 6(b). After 

examining the briefs and the record, we have concluded that oral argument is unnecessary. See Fed. R. 

App. P. 34(a); Cir. R. 34(f).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with 

Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

Case: 10-1718 Document: 9 Filed: 07/20/2010 Pages: 2
No. 10-1718 Page 2

contending that the new sentence is unreasonably high. But the sentence is within the 

Guideline range calculated by the district court using the methodology of our opinion, 

and an in-range sentence is presumed reasonable. See Rita v. United States, 551 U.S. 338 

(2007); United States v. Mykytiuk, 415 F.3d 606 (7th Cir. 2005). We do not see any reason 

to think this sentence unreasonable, provided that the Guideline calculation is correct.

Kirkpatrick says that it is not and points to an illustration in our opinion. We 

constructed a Guideline range that assigned Kirkpatrick an offense level of 24, which 

produced a recommended sentence of 57 to 71 months. We added that there are “some 

other ways of classifying the additional acts that might produce higher ranges, but level 

24 seems most likely.” We did not discuss any of those other ways or suggest that they 

would be erroneous. On remand, the district court concluded that Kirkpatrick should be 

in offense level 26, which implies a suggested range of 70 to 87 months. The critical step 

in that calculation was the court’s conclusion that Kirkpatrick’s lies (he said that he had 

committed four murders and had put out a contract on a federal agent’s life; the district 

judge concluded that he had been bragging) had substantially disrupted governmental 

functions by leading law-enforcement agencies to waste 200 person-hours on an 

unnecessary investigation. The judge therefore added four levels under U.S.S.G. 

§2A6.1(b)(4), while not adding two levels that our opinion had suggested. (The judge 

viewed these two adjustments as alternates that should not be applied cumulatively.) 

This is the step that Kirkpatrick says is erroneous.

How much disruption of governmental activity is “substantial” is a matter of 

degree. Leading an agency to waste 2,000 hours (one person-year of work) would be 

substantial; wasting 20 hours would not be; 200 wasted hours is somewhere in 

between. District judges have discretion about how to handle open-ended concepts 

such as “substantial”—especially given the conclusion in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 

220 (2005), that the Guidelines are not binding in the end. It makes little sense to confine 

sentencing judges’ discretion to interpret words such as “substantial” only to say that, 

once the range has been calculated, judges may use their personal understandings of 

wise sentencing policies to vary from the results. When the Guidelines themselves build 

in discretion, which words such as “substantial” do, district judges must be allowed 

leeway.

Kirkpatrick also contends that the district judge erred in imposing a fine of 

$1,000; the original fine had been $360. Our remand did not mention fines and 

therefore, Kirkpatrick insists, the district judge had to stick with the original. True, our 

remand did not mention fines, but we vacated the entire sentence. That is our norm. 

When resentencing a defendant, the district judge is entitled to reconstruct the whole 

sentence package in order to satisfy the Guidelines and the statutory criteria. There is a 

tradeoff between fines and imprisonment. A fine of $1,000 remains below the Guideline 

range (which for Kirkpatrick is $7,500 to $75,000), and there is no basis for upsetting this 

below-range fine.

AFFIRMED

Case: 10-1718 Document: 9 Filed: 07/20/2010 Pages: 2