Opinion ID: 3001937
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Drug Quantity Used at Sentencing

Text: Blake’s first substantial argument is his challenge to the drug quantity and type used to compute his sentence. The probation officer’s finding of 13 kilograms of crack, on which the district court relied, was based on Ivory’s trial testimony. Ivory testified that about five or six years before trial he was buying drugs from someone he knew to be supplied by Blake, but at some point he started buying directly from Blake. Ivory first testified that the original arrangement lasted “[m]aybe two years,” but in answering a specific question about when he started buying from Blake, Ivory responded, “Maybe two years ago.” Ivory did not clarify whether he meant two years before the March 2007 trial or two years before his October 2006 arrest. Ivory said that at the start of the relationship, he was buying an ounce of crack or powder cocaine from Blake every three days or so, but that as sales increased, Blake started fronting him 4.5 ounces at a time. Ivory did not say when during the relationship Blake started fronting him drugs, and, oddly, after Ivory had said that the drug Blake was fronting him was crack, the prosecutor interjected, “Usually crack,” before asking his next question. The probation officer probably relied upon the following testimony that summarized Ivory’s relationship with Blake: Q. About how often would – when did Blake start fronting you drugs as opposed to you buying them? A. About two years ago. Q. About two years ago. And about how often would Blake front you these four‐and‐a‐half ounces? No. 07‐2704 Page 4 A. On a weekly basis. Q. Every week? A. Yeah. Q. For two years? A. Yeah. The probation officer read this testimony to mean that Blake had provided Ivory with 4.5 ounces of crack every week for two years and computed a total of 468 ounces or about 13 kilograms. Blake argues that Ivory’s testimony was unreliable, and the government correctly responds that the district court was free to credit Ivory’s testimony. See, e.g., United States v. Abdulahi, 523 F.3d 757, 761 (7th Cir. 2008). But this dispute is beside the point; Ivory’s testimony can be both reliable and not supportive of the probation officer’s calculation. Although a district court “has leeway to extrapolate quantities from witnesses’ statements of minimum sales over several occasions,” United States v. Noble, 299 F.3d 907, 911 (7th Cir. 2002), any such extrapolation must be correctly calculated from those statements, see, e.g., United States v. Eschman, 227 F.3d 886, 889‐91 (7th Cir. 2000); United States v. Acosta, 85 F.3d 275, 282‐83 (7th Cir. 1996). At sentencing, the court can consider only information that has “sufficient indicia of reliability to support its probable accuracy.” U.S.S.G. § 6A1.3(a). The district court did not make an independent assessment of the trial evidence but instead rested its quantity determination on the probation officer’s calculation. That calculation, however, was not sufficiently reliable because, first, the probation officer read Ivory’s testimony to mean that he was in a fronting arrangement with Blake for exactly two years. But immediately before Ivory answered “yes” when the prosecutor asked if the relationship had lasted for two years, Ivory had said that the relationship began “two years ago.” Two years before trial was March 2005, and, indeed, the government’s brief includes a citation to Ivory’s testimony for the very proposition that he and Blake commenced their relationship in 2005, not earlier. That relationship necessarily ended in October 2006, when Blake and Ivory were arrested, which would add up to a total of 19 months, not 24, and a drug quantity of only 370 ounces or about 10.5 kilograms. And further undermining the probation officer’s calculation, there is record evidence contradicting Ivory’s testimony that Blake always fronted him crack: one of the deals that an informant initiated with Ivory was supposed to be for crack, but Blake delivered powder cocaine instead. Perhaps that is why after Ivory testified that what Blake was fronting him was crack, the prosecutor clarified that it was “usually crack.” These unexplained discrepancies call into question the reliability of the probation officer’s calculation that Blake was responsible for 13 kilograms of crack. But that does not No. 07‐2704 Page 5 mean that the district court was required to, as Blake suggests, use a drug quantity based only on the drugs that were actually seized. Instead, the district court should have attempted to resolve the inconsistencies in Ivory’s testimony to reach a reasonable estimate of drug quantity. See, e.g., United States v. Hollins, 498 F.3d 622, 631‐32 (7th Cir. 2007). Even so, there was no error in the district court’s choice of base offense level because the drug quantity used, 13 kilograms of crack, is so much greater than the 1.5 kilograms required to reach the level 38 assigned by the court to Blake. To arrive at that base offense level, the court did not have to believe, as the probation officer apparently did, that Blake fronted Ivory 4.5 ounces of crack per week for two years. The court needed only to believe that over the course of their relationship, Blake fronted Ivory a total of 1.5 kilograms of crack, which is equivalent to only 12 deliveries of 4.5 ounces of crack, or about three months of the relationship Ivory claimed lasted for two years. Such an estimate is reasonable, cf. United States v. Acosta, No. 06‐1519, 2008 WL 2738062, at  (7th Cir. July 15, 2008), so the court’s offense‐level calculation was not error. And Blake does not argue that even given the same offense level, a finding of a lower drug quantity would have had an impact on the ultimate sentence imposed. Thus, we affirm Blake’s sentence.