Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca10-89-02229/USCOURTS-ca10-89-02229-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Ezequiel Lucatero-Campos
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

UN+TED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

TENTH CIRCUIT 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

. Plt!O 

Urut'<i Sta,~ !Aurr c,f Appeals 

Tenth Cfreuit · 

ore .. 4 f§SO 

&OBERT L. HOECKER 

Clerk 

vs. 

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) 

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No. 89-2229 

EZEQUIEL LUCATERO-CAMPOS, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

(D.C. No. 86-160-JB-02) 

(D.N.M.) 

ORDER AND JUDGMENT* 

Before HOLLOWAY, Chief Judge, LOGAN and BALDOCK, Circuit Judges.** 

Defendant-appellant, Ezequiel Lucatero-Campos, appeals his 

conviction and sentence. A jury convicted def.endant of possession 

with intent to distribute less than fifty kilograms of marijuana, 

21 u.s.c. § 841(a)(l) and 21 u.s.c. § 84l(b)(l)(d). 1 Defendant 

was sentenced to fifty-one months imprisonment to be followed by a 

* This order and judgment has no precedential value and shall 

not be cited, or used by any court within the Tenth Circuit, 

except for purposes of establishing the doctrines of the law of 

the case, res judicata, or collateral estoppel. 10th Cir. R. 

36.3. 

** The parties have waived oral argument. See 10th Cir. R. 

34.1.19. The cause therefore is ordered submitted without oral 

argument. 

1 Although the indictment did not reference 18 u.s.c. § 2 which 

provides for principal liability for those who aid and abet a 

crime,§ 2 was incorporated. Section 2 applies to the entire 

criminal code for "[i]t is rather a statutory canon defining an 

ingredient of criminal responsibility generally, than the 

definition by law of any crime." Breeze v. United States, 398 

F.2d 178, 183 (10th Cir. 1968). 

Appellate Case: 89-2229 Document: 010110093942 Date Filed: 12/04/1990 Page: 1 
three-year period of supervised release. Defendant timely filed 

his notice of appeal and we have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 

u.s.c. § 1291 and 18 u.s.c. § 3742(a). 

Defendant raises three points for reversal: 1) sufficiency 

of the evidence, 2) failure to give a requested instruction, and 

3) an error in calculating the criminal history category when 

imposing sentence. We affirm the conviction, vacate the sentence 

and remand for resentencing. 

At approximately 11:30 p.m. on March 28, 1989, border patrol 

agent Michael Harrison was alerted that a car entering north on 

Highway 11 near Columbus, New Mexico might contain illegal aliens. 

Harrison drove eighteen miles northward, after first observing an 

older Cadillac heading south. He turned around and headed toward 

Columbus, thinking that the Cadillac was the car he was after. As 

he was headed south toward Columbus, he again saw the Cadillac; 

this time it was headed north. Harrison turned around to follow 

it. A few minutes later, he saw the Cadillac parked along the 

road with the passenger door open. No occupants were in the car, 

but three bags of clothing were. Harrison, assisted by other 

agents, used tracking methods to follow three sets of bootprints, 

two from common cowboy boots and one from Chihuahua-heel boots, 

which have a smaller track. 

The bootprints led directly east to a fence parallel to the 

highway. Further down, an abandoned suitcase was found containing 

nine packages of marijuana. Continuing to track the footprints, 

Harrison discovered a mark by a fence post where "somebody had 

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drug their heel and made a big mark." Rec. vol. II at 57. 

Harrison tagged the location and continued to follow the tracks 

which led to a boarded-up house eight miles away from the 

abandoned car. Harrison and his fellow agents began yelling for 

the men to come out. Three men crawled out of a window and were 

identified as defendant and his co-defendants Maldonado-Campos and 

Castillos-Granados. Two were wearing regular cowboy boots and one 

(Maldonado-Campos) was wearing Chihuahua-heel boots. When the 

agents returned to the spot which was marked, they discovered a 

second suitcase containing marijuana hidden under tumbleweeds 

several yards away. The weight of the marijuana from the two 

suitcases was in excess of fifty pounds. 

Defendant contends that sufficient evidence does not exist to 

link him to the bootprints or suitcases containing contraband. He 

contends that casts were not made of his bootprints and only an 

agent, rather than an expert, identifed the boots as making the 

tracks. He also relies upon an absence of fingerprint evidence by 

the government. He contends that the district court should have 

granted his motion for judgment of acquittal. Fed. R. Crim. P. 

29(a). 

Given the jury's verdict, we review the evidence and its 

reasonable inferences in the light most favorable to the 

government to determine whether "any rational trier of fact could 

have found the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt." 

Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319 (1979) (emphasis omitted). 

A criminal conviction based upon principal liability, including 

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aiding and abetting, may rest upon circumstantial evidence. 

United States v. Johnson, 911 F.2d 1394, 1399 (10th Cir. 1990); 

United States v. Russell, 905 F.2d 1450, 1453 (10th Cir.), cert. 

denied, 111 S. Ct. 267 (1990). The trial facts convince us that 

the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to connect defendant to 

the contraband and the crime, from which the jury could have found 

the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Defendant also claims that the trial court erred in failing 

to give his proposed missing witness instruction. We review the 

jury instructions as a whole and must be satisfied that the charge 

"was not misleading and contained an accurate statement of the law 

to guide the jury's determination." United States v. Park, 421 

U.S. 658, 675 (1975). The £ailure to give a missing witness 

instruction upon proper objection is reviewed for an abuse of 

discretion. United States v. Sutton, 732 F.2d 1483, 1492 (10th 

Cir. 1984), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1157 (1985). We recently 

identified several factors which may guide a trial court in 

exercising its discretion in this area. Wilson v. Merrell Dow 

Pharmaceuticals Inc., 893 F.2d 1149, 1150-52 (10th Cir. 1990). 

Defendant suggests that a missing witness instruction should 

have been given because the government could have called a 

fingerprint expert "to match prints taken from [defendant] with 

any prints which may have been on either the red or gold 

suitcase." Appellant's Brief at 17. Defendant claims that 

government's failure to call such a witness results in the 

inference that no prints existed or the prints did not match those 

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• of the defendant. Id. Defendant continues: "The absence of such 

testimony was, therefore, well within [defendant's] theory." Id. 

at 17-18 (citing rec. vol. II at 81, 85, 87, 117, 166). We have 

reviewed the record citations offered by the defendant and they 

uniformly establish that no witness ever took fingerprints from 

the suitcases. The government's investigation did not encompass 

searching for fingerprints on the suitcases, thus, the defendant 

could not show that the government had the power to produce this 

purely hypothetical witness. See Wilson, 893 F.2d at 1150-51. In 

the absence of a missing witness, the district court did not abuse 

its discretion in denying the instruction. See Sutton, 732 F.2d 

at 1492 (trial court did not abuse discretion in finding no 

missing witnesses). Moreover, the defendant offered no 

explanation to the trial court why a missing witness instruction 

was appropriate. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 30. 

Defendant finally contends that the district court erred in 

applying the Sentencing Guidelines. We review the district 

court's legal determinations concerning the guidelines de ,nmm; 

factual determinations are reviewed under the clearly erroneous 

standard. 18 U.S.C. § 3742(e); United States v. Rutter, 897 F.2d 

1558, 1560 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 111 S. Ct. 88 (1990). The 

district court assigned the defendant a criminal history score of 

eleven. See United States Sentencing Comm'n, Guidelines Manual 

§ 4Al.1 (Nov. 1990). At issue is the inclusion of four points: 

two points based upon a five-month sentence for illegal entry 

imposed on December 13, 1978, see id.§ 4Al.l(b), and another two 

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• points for committing the instant offense while on escape status 

from a 210-day sentence imposed on January 13, 1983, see id. 

§ 4Al. 1 (d). 

The government concedes that under§ 4Al.2(e)(2) (ten-year 

limit on inclusion of prior sentences imposed which do not exceed 

one year and one month of imprisonment), inclusion of the sentence 

imposed in 1978 was clearly erroneous under the applicable 

guideline. Given that the instant offense occurred on March 28, 

1989, we agree and the case will be remanded for resentencing. 

Defendant also contends that he should not be deemed to have 

committed the instant offense while under escape status from a 

sentence imposed in 1983. See id. § 4Al. 1 ( d) & comment (n. 4). At 

the sentencing hearing, defendant explained that he was willing to 

plead guilty to an information charging the escape, but that the 

U.S. Attorney in Arizona has not moved forward on prosecution 

since 1985. Rec. vol. II at 276. According to the defendant's 

brief, he "has neither answered nor been convicted of escape; 

therefore, he cannot be considered for sentencing purposes to have 

committed the instant offense while under escape status." 

Appellant's Brief at 22. Although§ 4Al.l(d) has been applied 

when the underlying offense was escape, see United States v. 

Goldbaum, 879 F.2d 811 (10th Cir. 1989), that is not an essential 

prerequisite. Section 4Al.l(d) speaks of "escape status" and does 

not require an adjudication of that status. The district court 

could rely upon the bench warrant issued for defendant's arrest 

based upon escape, together with counsel's admission that 

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defendant was willing to plead guilty, and include two points for 

committing the instant offense while on escape status from the 

1983 sentence. Thus, the district court's inclusion of two points 

based upon defendant's unadjudicated escape status was neither 

incorrect as a matter of law, nor clearly erroneous. 

We AFFIRM the conviction, VACATE the sentence, and REMAND for 

resentencing. 

Entered for the Court 

Bobby R. Baldock 

United States Circuit Judge 

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