In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 21-3372 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v.

BENJAMIN BIANCOFIORI, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 16 CR 306-1 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge. 

____________________ 

SUBMITTED FEBRUARY 26, 2024 — DECIDED FEBRUARY 28, 2024 

____________________ 

Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and ST. EVE,

Circuit Judges. 

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. A jury convicted Benjamin 

Biancofiori of sex trafficking by force, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 

§1591, and he was sentenced to 360 months in prison plus supervised release for life. The evidence permitted the jury to 

find that, between 2007 and 2016, Biancofiori compelled nine 

adult women to engage in prostitution, beating them if they 

tried to escape or failed to hand over their receipts. Details do 
2 No. 21-3372 

not matter for current purposes. We address in this opinion 

Biancofiori’s contention that §1591 covers only the sex trafficking of minors or is unconstitutional. We address his other 

appellate arguments in a non-precedential order released 

contemporaneously.

Section 1591(a) reads: 

Sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud, or coercion

(a) Whoever knowingly— 

(1) in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, or within 

the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United 

States, recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains, 

advertises, maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a 

person; or

(2) benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from 

participation in a venture which has engaged in an act described in violation of paragraph (1),

knowing, or, except where the act constituting the violation of 

paragraph (1) is advertising, in reckless disregard of the fact, that 

means of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion described in subsection (e)(2), or any combination of such means will be used to 

cause the person to engage in a commercial sex act, or that the 

person has not attained the age of 18 years and will be caused to 

engage in a commercial sex act, shall be punished as provided in 

subsection (b).

The trailing paragraph makes trafficking of a minor an alternative to trafficking of “a person” by “force, threats of force, 

fraud, coercion ... or any combination of such means”. Either 

trafficking through force or trafficking a minor suffices. And 

if there were doubt (which there is not), the caption—“trafficking of children or by force” (emphasis added)—shows that 

the language of the trailing paragraph is not some kind of garble. A statute’s caption cannot diminish the scope of the 
No. 21-3372 3 

statute’s text, see Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542 

U.S. 241, 256 (2004), but it can show that the text means what 

it appears to say, as this caption does. The text and caption 

together are sufficiently clear that it would be unwarranted to 

consider legislative history.

Biancofiori insists that this straightforward reading of the 

statute produces absurd results by penalizing the sex trafficking of adults more harshly than the sex trafficking of minors. 

Under subsection (b)(2), to which subsection (a) refers, the 

minimum sentence for sex trafficking of a minor is 10 years’ 

imprisonment, while subsection (b)(1) provides for a 15-year 

minimum sentence when the defendant traffics any person by 

force. We have two reactions.

First, we do not see any incongruity in providing that using force increases the minimum sentence. Congress did not 

take leave of its senses in providing that trafficking an 18-

year-old girl by beatings and other physical terror is more serious than trafficking a 17-year-old girl without force. 

Second, Biancofiori supposes that judges should use their 

own ideas of what is absurd or strange to override an explicit 

statutory text. We held in Jaskolski v. Daniels, 427 F.3d 456, 461–

62 (7th Cir. 2005); United States v. Logan, 453 F.3d 804, 806 (7th 

Cir. 2006), affirmed, 552 U.S. 23 (2007); Spivey v. Vertrue, Inc., 

528 F.3d 982, 984–85 (7th Cir. 2008); and Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co., 679 F.3d 637 (7th Cir. 2012), that only linguistic absurdity permits a corrective intervention; substantive matters 

are for the legislature whether or not a judge finds the choice 

hard to swallow. As we put it in Soppet, 679 F.3d at 642: 

“[A]djudication is not the continuation of legislation by other 

means.”
4 No. 21-3372 

We could not find any appellate decision holding that 

§1591(a) is limited to the sex trafficking of minors. Nor could 

we find any precedential opinion holding the opposite, 

though United States v. Cook, 782 F.3d 983 (8th Cir. 2015), is 

close. But the argument has been made frequently in district 

courts, and at least one district judge bought it. United States 

v. Afyare, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86587 (M.D. Tenn. June 12, 

2013), reversed, 632 Fed. App’x 272 (6th Cir. 2016). Although 

the Sixth Circuit did not issue a precedential decision—apparently believing the issue too clear for reasonable debate, see 

632 Fed. App’x at 275–79—the fact that a patter of arguments 

similar to Biancofiori’s continues in the district courts implies 

the need to resolve the matter with precedential effect.

Biancofiori’s fallback is that §1591(a) is unconstitutionally 

vague. For the reasons we have given, however, the statute’s 

rule is well-defined. Biancofiori’s argument relies on statements in the legislative history, not on the statutory language. 

Many a statement by many a legislator is vague, or does not 

match the enacted statute, but that does not render invalid an 

enacted text whose meaning is ascertainable. We do not perceive any other plausible constitutional argument against the 

statute’s application to Biancofiori.

AFFIRMED