Source: http://info.sfcriminallawspecialist.com/bid/90617/Sentencing-Partners-May-2014-Part-II
Timestamp: 2017-06-28 00:10:07
Document Index: 741855169

Matched Legal Cases: ['§4', '§4', '§4', '§88', '§88', '§88', '§88', '§88', '§88', '§3583', '§88', '§3583', '§3553', '§3553', '§3553', '§3553', '§3553', '§3553']

Sentencing Partners - May 2014 (Part II)
Chris Morales on Mon, Jun 02, 2014 @ 01:15 PM
Criminal History(Chapter 4)
United States v. Stokes2014 WL 1673132 (8th Cir. 2014)Relying on erroneous conclusion to deny variance was procedurally unreasonable
United States v. Santiago-Burgos2014 WL 1613707 (1st Cir. 2014)Prior conviction was overt act within conspiracy under §4A1.2
The defendant, along with dozens of other people, was indicted on multiple drug conspiracycounts. In 2006, while the drug conspiracy was active, the defendant was sentenced to a short prison term and three years of supervised release for assaulting a Drug Enforcement Agency informant. The supervised release was eventually revoked as a result of the current charges. In April 2011, the defendant pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine, fifty grams of cocaine base,one kilogram of heroin, 100 kilograms of marijuana, and/or Oxycodone and Xanax, all within 1000 feet of a school or public housing complex. The PSR assigned two criminal history points for the 2006 informant assault conviction, under §4A1.1(b), and assigned two additional points because the instant offense was committed, in part, while the defendant was under a term of supervised release for the informant assault conviction, pursuant to §4A1.1(d). The district court sustained the defendant’s objection to the two criminal history points based on theinformant assault, finding that the basis that the assault was an overt act within the conspiracy. However, the district court sided with the government and imposed the two points related to the commission of the instant offense while on supervised release. The district court imposed a sentence of 97 months and ordered it to run consecutively to the thirteen-month sentence he received on the informant assault case after hissupervised release was revoked. On appeal, the government conceded that the district court committed error in calculating the criminal history. “The same rationale that the district court employed to deduct two criminal history points under section 4A1.1(b) that the assault was an overt act within the conspiracy to which [the defendant] was pleading guilty should apply to the two points assessed under section 4A1.1(d). We accept this concession and say no more about the issue.” The sentence was reversed and remanded.
United States v. Barbour2014 WL 1499829 (6th Cir. 2014)
Government failed to show prior offenses were committed on different occasionsThe defendant pled guilty to possessing ammunition as a convicted felon after admitting that he had three prior convictions for aggravated robbery. The PSR concluded that the defendant was an armed career criminal based, in part, on a prior armed robbery committed by the defendant and three accomplices. The robbery occurred at a Gas-N-Go Market, where the four robbed a motorist in front of the store, then went inside the store and robbed it.The defendant objected to the ACC designation, arguing that there was no evidence showing that the robbery of the motorist and the robbery of the store occurred on different occasions. The record of the robbery did not make clear whether the robbery of the motorist concluded before the robbery of the store began. Despite this, the district court adopted the PSR and imposed a sentence of 188 months. The Sixth Circuit reversed, explaining that for the ACC enhancement to apply, the defendant must have had three previous convictions for “a violent felony or a serious drug offense, or both, committed on occasions different from one another.” Further, the court noted that the statute did not define what it meant for offenses to be “committed on occasions different from one another,” but under United States v. Hughes, 924 F.2d 1354 (6th Cir. 1991), the court had defined a “criminal episode as an incident that is part of a series, but forms a separate unit within the whole. Although related to the entire course of events, an episode is a punctuated occurrence with a limited duration.” Here, the district court concluded that the defendant completed the first robbery outside the convenience store, and “then entered the convenience store and robbed the convenience store.” However, “[t]he record does not provide any evidence as to whether the robbery outside the store concluded before the robbery inside the store began. Nothing in the record refutes [the defendant’s] argument that the threat to the motorist could have continued beyond the point where the robbery of the store clerk began. Because there was no evidence before the district court from which it could reasonably conclude that the robbery of the motorist ended before the robbery of the store began, such a conclusion is clearly erroneous.”
United States v. Whiteside2014 WL 1364019 (4th Cir. 2014)Equitable tolling applied; erroneous application of career offender amounted to fundamental miscarriage of justice
United States v. Kumar2014 WL 1586427 (6th Cir. 2014)
The defendant, a licensed pilot, was a nineteenyear- old student enrolled in the Aviation Technology Program at Bowling Green State University. He was given the assignment of flying alone at night to an airport in Cleveland, then return that same night. The flight plan required him to fly over a portion of Lake Erie. On the return flight, the defendant saw what he thought was a flare rising from a boat on the lake below. When he reported this sighting, he was instructed to fly lower for a closer look. As he did so, he could not see a boat, but, fearful of sounding stupid and hurting his chances of one day becoming a Coast Guard pilot, he reported that he saw additional flares going up, and described a 25-foot fishing vessel with four people aboard wearing life jackets with strobe lights activated. His report prompted a massive search and rescue mission by the U.S. Coast Guard, with help from the Canadian Armed Forces. The search lasted 21 hours and involved four vessels and two aircraft, including a Canadian CC130 Hercules airplane with a crew of seven. Over a month later, the defendant admitted to a Coast Guard investigator that his report had been false. He pled guilty to one charge of making a false distress call, in violation of 14 U.S.C. §88(c)(1). At sentencing, the government offered evidence showing the hourly costs of using various Coast Guard assets and personnel, which included overhead, management and supervisory costs, etc. The district court imposed a three-month prison sentence, with three years of supervised release. The district court also ordered the defendant to pay restitution to the Coast Guard, under §88(c)(3), in the amount of $277,257.70, as well as $211,750.00 to the Canadian Armed Forces, as a condition of his supervised release. On appeal the defendant argued that the “all costs incurred as a result” language in §88(c)(3) limited restitution to actual losses proximately caused by his false report and that his actions did not increase the costs incurred; i.e. the Coast Guard would have incurred the fixed expenses regardless of his false report. The Sixth Circuit disagreed, holding that §88(c) did not limit the recoverable costs to increased costs. “Section 88(c) renders [the defendant] liable for all costs associated with resources mobilized as a result of his false report. We therefore find no error in the district court’s ruling that [he] is liable under §88(c) for the full cost of the service rendered by the Coast Guard, $277,257.70.” The defendant also argued that the district court erred in ordering restitution to the Canadian Armed Forces as a condition of his supervised release. He claimed that the specific language of §88(c) addressing liability for associated costs controlled over the more general provision of 18 U.S.C. §3583(d). “One of the most basic canons of statutory interpretation is that a more specific provision takes precedence over a more general one,” but canons apply only “where there is an apparent conflict between laws, or some other ambiguity that requires the court to go beyond the plain meaning of a statute’s text to discern legislative purpose.” The court found that there was neither conflict nor ambiguity in the language of these statutes. “[T]here being no conflict between the two statutes and no material ambiguity in their language, there is no reason why the two statutes cannot be deemed to coexist and co-operate. There is no support for the notion that §88(c) reflects a congressional purpose to exclude victims other than the Coast Guard from recovery of losses caused by a false report. We find no error in the district court’s determination that it had authority under §3583(d) to order [the defendant] to pay restitution to the Canadian Armed Forces.” Miscellaneous Issues
United States v. Wiseman2014 WL 1599461 (10th Cir. 2014)
The defendant pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute oxycodone. The PSR foundher responsible for 1,080 pills and recommended a sentencing range of 57 to 71 months. The defendant filed a motion for a downward variance, asking the district court to apply §3553(a)(6) to consider the sentencing disparity between her guideline range and similarly situated state court defendants in Utah. She pointed out that a similarly situated defendant in statecourt would face a lower sentence. The district court declined to depart based on that factor, but did vary to a sentence of 48 months. On appeal, the defendant argued that comparing a possible state sentence to the federal sentence was a permissible consideration under 18 U.S.C. §3553(a)(6). The Tenth Circuit affirmed the sentence, explaining that the language of §3553(a)(6) “does not mean that a sentence calculated under the Guidelines is unreasonable simply because it is harsher than a state-court sentence would be for a comparable crime.” “The sole concern of section 3553(a)(6) is with sentencing disparities among federal defendants . . . . The Guidelines [seek] to avoid only the unwarranted disparities that exist [ ] in the federal criminal justice system, that system for which the Guidelines are governing law.” United States v. Branson, 463 F.3d 1110 (10th Cir. 2006). The district court did consider §3553(a)(6), but it “correctly understood its authority because §3553(a)(6) applies only when addressing sentencing disparities among and between federal defendants sentenced under the federal sentencing guideline regime. For the district court’s ruling to be an error, state-federal disparities would have to be relevant under §3553(a)(6), but they are not. It cannot therefore be procedural error for the district court to fail to consider an issue irrelevant to that factor.”
Cases In This IssueUnited States v. Almeida, 2014 WL 1328299 (1st Cir. 2014)United States v. Barbour, 2014 WL 1499829 (6th Cir. 2014)United States v. Castro-Perez, 2014 WL 1646944 (10th Cir.2014)United States v. Dominguez-Maroyoqui, 2014 WL 1344472 (9th Cir. 2014)United States v. Kamper, 2014 WL 1378192 (6th Cir. 2014)United States v. Kilgore, 2014 WL 1424474 (6th Cir. 2014)United States v. Kumar, 2014 WL 1586427 (6th Cir. 2014)United States v. Maguire, 2014 WL 1356031 (1st Cir. 2014)United States v. Santiago-Burgos, 2014 WL 1613707 (1st Cir. 2014)United States v. Stokes, 2014 WL 1673132 (8th Cir. 2014)United States v. Taylor, 2014 WL 1509027 (9th Cir. 2014)United States v. Whiteside, 2014 WL 1364019 (4th Cir. 2014)United States v. Wiseman, 2014 WL 1599461 (10th Cir. 2014)
Published By Joaquin & Duncan, L.L.C.;A Law Firm of Federal Sentencing Attorneys For more information visit: http://joaquinduncan.com/ Tags:
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