Opinion ID: 866597
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Blair’s Criminal and Psychological History

Text: Blair robbed a bank on December 6, 2011. He was arrested within minutes of the robbery and indicted on January 4, 2012. He entered into a plea agreement which was filed on March 1, 2012 and pled guilty on March 21, 2012. There is no reason to infer that guilt of this offense was ever in question. The morning of December 6, 2011, Blair boarded and rode a bus 90 blocks from his house. He left the bus. Then he walked into a bank. He wore a sky‐blue winter coat, wrapped a scarf around his face and wrote a demand note which he gave to a teller who complied. He ran out of the bank and stayed in the immediate area where police arrested him. He still had the money and told officers that he robbed the bank to get money to pay for the restitution he owed on three prior bank robbery convictions. Blair’s life has been troubled in many ways. He was first arrested at 15 and again at 16 and committed by a children’s court to juvenile facilities. As an adult he was charged with a variety of defenses, given probation and some jail time. At the age of 22, he received 6 years in prison for armed robbery. He accumulated many disciplinary violations along with another criminal conviction for escape at age 26. His first federal conviction was in 1997 on three counts of armed robbery of banks committed within less than two weeks. The sentence was 140 months on each robbery and ran concurrently. In prison his disciplinary record was lengthy and he assaulted a correctional officer for which he received a 46 month consecutive sentence. Eventually he was placed on 1 In its brief here, the Government did not argue that Blair cannot raise his claims because he never brought a failure to rule to the attention of the court. In United States v. Cunningham, 429 F.3d 673, 679‐80 (7th Cir. 2005) it was held that a lawyer in federal court is not required to except to rulings by the trial judge although the court observed that taking exception to the judge’s failure to consider certain issues “might indeed have been a desirable thing for the lawyer to do—we might have been spared this appeal