Opinion ID: 765997
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Terrence Gibbs

Text: 110 As discussed supra, Terrence Gibbs, as one of the ringleaders of the alleged cocaine conspiracy, was indicted on a number of counts. In Count 1, he was charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine and to possess cocaine with the intent to distribute. The indictment alleged that Gibbs supervised a number of associates who distributed powder and crack cocaine; that he obtained kilograms of cocaine from supplier Juan Arana; and that he used violence to protect himself in his position as leader of the conspiracy. The jury convicted Gibbs of Count 1 and the District Court sentenced him to life imprisonment on this count. 19 111 The government established its case against Gibbs in much the same way that it did against Sydnor and Brown: through intercepted phone conversations and the interpretation thereof by Agent Coleman. It also adduced testimony from a cooperating witness named Charles Wilkes. On appeal, Gibbs objects both to his conviction and to his sentence. With regard to his conviction, he first argues that Agent Coleman's testimony went beyond mere interpretation of the coded conversations into the realm of speculation and that the District Court therefore plainly erred in allowing Agent Coleman to so testify. We find no merit in this contention, which was not raised in the District Court and which we therefore consider under a plain error standard of review, see Coates, 178 F.3d at 683, and we reject it summarily in the margin. 20 112 Gibbs's principal contention is that the District Court erred in allowing the government to submit evidence of violent acts by members of the conspiracy and that, even if such evidence were properly admitted, the Court erred by giving the limiting instruction it did with regard to the evidence of violence. This Court has not reached this question before, and though we do not think it is a difficult question, we address it herein to offer future guidance to district courts and practitioners. As to sentencing, Gibbs argues that the District Court erred in finding that he was responsible for in excess of 150 kilograms of powder cocaine and 1.5 kilograms of crack.
113 The government introduced evidence at trial about the 718use of violence in the conspiracy. For example, it introduced testimony that Gibbs, who suspected that Maurice Grannum had attempted to kidnap him, sent Earl Packer Hunte and Derrick Parks to shoot Grannum, and that once Gibbs suspected that Sydnor had shot him, he sent Earl Brown and Frank Fluellen on a mission to kill Sydnor. Two police officers also testified that the attempt to shoot Grannum did occur on the date and time Gibbs and Parks had agreed upon. (The bullets passed into the police officers' apartment.) Although the defense did not object to the admission of this evidence at trial, Gibbs now complains that this evidence should have been excluded because (i) the admission of the evidence served no other purpose than to portray him as ruthless and violent; (ii) the government did not offer the evidence under any one theory of admissibility, as required by Rule 404(b); and (iii) the government failed to show that the probative value of the evidence outweighed its prejudicial effect. 114 We review a district court's decision to admit evidence for abuse of discretion. See Government of V.I. v. Edwards, 903 F.2d 267, 270 (3d Cir. 1990). Because the defendant did not request a limiting instruction with regard to the evidence of violence at trial, we review the District Court's jury instructions for plain error. See Price, 13 F.3d at 724; see also Henderson v. Kibbe, 431 U.S. 145, 154 (1977) (noting that [i]t is the rare case in which an improper instruction will justify reversal of a criminal conviction when no objection has been made in the trial court.). 115 Rule 404(b), which proscribes the admission of evidence of other crimes when offered to prove bad character, does not apply to evidence of uncharged offenses committed by a defendant when those acts are intrinsic to the proof of the charged offense. As a prominent commentator has explained: 116 In cases where the incident offered is a part of the conspiracy alleged in the indictment, the evidence is admissible under Rule 404(b) because it is not an 'other' crime. The evidence is offered as direct evidence of the fact in issue, not as circumstantial evidence requiring an inference as to the character of the accused. Such proof . . . may be extremely prejudicial to the defendant but the court would have no discretion to exclude it because it is proof of the ultimate issue in the case. 117 22 Charles A. Wright & Kenneth W. Graham, Federal Practice and Procedure § 5239, at 450-51 (1978). 118 A number of courts likewise have held that Rule 404(b) does not limit the admission of evidence of the defendant's participation in acts of violence as direct proof of a conspiracy. In United States v. Miller, 116 F.3d 641 (2d Cir. 1997), cert. denied, 118 S. Ct. 2063 (1998), for example, the court held that proof of murders by the defendants did not fall under 404(b) even though the murders were not charged in the indictment; rather, the court held that the murders were relevant to show the existence and nature of the conspiracy. See id. at 682; see also United States v. Chin, 83 F.3d 83, 87-88 (4th Cir. 1996) (holding that testimony challenged under 404(b) regarding contract killing scheme emphasized the violent and dangerous context of a heroin deal, and was inextricably intertwined with defendant's crime of selling heroin and conducting an ongoing criminal enterprise). We endorse this reading of Rule 404(b). Since the government introduced evidence of Gibbs's use of violence to further the illegal objectives of the cocaine conspiracy by removing threats to himself (since threats to Gibbs meant threats to the trafficking enterprise), the District Court did not abuse its discretion in permitting this evidence to come in. 21
119 The government presented two witnesses at Gibbs's sentencing hearing: Agent Coleman and Charles Wilkes, a self-proclaimed contract killer facing the death penalty who struck a deal with the government. Gibbs contends that the District Court erred in reaching its totals of 150 kilograms of powder cocaine and 1.5 kilograms of crack based on this testimony. 22 We review the District Court's determination of the drug quantities attributable to Gibbs for clear error. See Miele, 989 F.2d at 663. 120 Agent Coleman testified that the conspiracy received 111 kilograms of powder cocaine in the four-month period in which the government wiretapped Gibbs's phone. From that number, the government asserted that the conspiracy must have handled at least 150 kilograms over the life of the conspiracy, which ran from the summer of 1992 through April 1995 (approximately thirty-one months). The government notes that Agent Coleman's estimate of 111 kilograms was a conservative one: the electronic surveillance did not cover every day between November 1994 and April 1995; Gibbs used other phones that the government did not wiretap; and if the conversation involved a multi-kilogram transaction but Agent Coleman could not determine the specific number of kilograms under negotiation, he attributed one kilogram to the conversation. 121 Agent Coleman described his attribution method as follows: 122 [W]hen I reviewed . . . the tape recordings of the conversations, after conducting the wire, I was able to determine a pattern of speech where kilograms . . . of cocaine were discussed. And most of these conversations were between Terrence Gibbs and Juan Arana or Juan Arana and Domingo Arana or others. And I would take my analysis of either the money that was discussed referring to kilograms of cocaine or the kilograms of cocaine and determine how many were discussed in each conversation. Some conversations . . . discussed, what I believe to be crack cocaine. 123 He compiled a list of fifty-two phone conversations and the amounts he believed were discussed in each conversation. 124 As we discussed supra, it is appropriate for a district court to base its quantity calculations on intercepted conversations. The government can base its calculations on the amount of drugs under negotiation, see United States v. Raven, 39 F.3d 428, 432 (3d Cir. 1994), and it need not prove that the amounts under negotiation were actually distributed, see United States v. Layeni, 90 F.3d 514, 522 (D.C. Cir. 1996). A district court may carefully estimate the total drug quantities involved in a conspiracy based on evidence of average drug transactions during the conspiracy. See U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1 application note 12. In addition, a leader of a drug conspiracy is responsible for drug quantities transacted by his subordinates in furtherance of the conspiracy. See, e.g., United States v. Russell, 134 F.3d 171, 184 (3d Cir. 1998) (attributing to defendant, who was the conspiracy's organizer, the total quantity of drugs for which defendant's co-conspirators had taken responsibility); United States v. Magana , 118 F.3d 1173, 1206 (7th Cir. 1997) (holding that defendant is liable for entire quantity of drugs attributable to conspiracy in circumstances where defendant is one of conspiracy's central figures). 23 125 While the conversations and amounts calculated there from are too lengthy to recount here, the District Court did not clearly err in finding that the government had proved the quantities of powder attributable to Gibbs by a preponderance. In fact, it appears that Agent Coleman was conservative in Gibbs's favor in his calculations. 126 The government must also prove by a preponderance that the substance involved is crack. See United States v. Holman, 168 F.3d 655, 658 (3d Cir. 1999) (noting that [i]t is the serious duty of the district court to hold the government to the preponderance standard, particularly because of the impact the identity determination has on sentencing). Agent Coleman testified that twelve kilograms of crack were sold during the life of the conspiracy. First, agents seized baking soda and cooking equipment from the apartment in which Gibbs allegedly cooked powder into crack. Second, Agent Coleman interpreted Discussions involving cocaine that was hard or done as Discussions about cocaine that had been cooked into crack. Third, Collier, Ellis, Parks, and Wilkes all testified that they personally had seen crack processed and distributed while they were members of the conspiracy. In fact, Ellis testified that he helped Gibbs process kilograms of crack five or six times. Coleman testified that the process these witnesses had seen would indeed produce crack. Finally, to avoid double counting when calculating Gibbs's sentence, the District Court subtracted these twelve kilograms of crack from the 111 kilograms of powder, since the crack had been processed from the powder. 127 We conclude that the government proved by a preponderance that Gibbs was responsible for producing at least 1.5 kilograms of crack. In fact, it arguably proved that Gibbs had produced much more than that, in light of the taped conversations and Ellis's testimony that he had been present when Gibbs cooked five or six kilograms of cocaine into crack. The government does not need to perform chemical analysis on the seized substances in order to prove that a substance was crack, see United States v. Dent, 149 F.3d 180, 190 (3d Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 119 S. Ct. 833 (1999); Roman, 121 F.3d at 141, and other courts have held that the government may rely on the testimony of co-conspirators who distributed crack or who observed its manufacture to establish that the substance at issue was crack, see United States v. Hargrett, 156 F.3d 447, 451 (2d Cir.) (holding that testimony of co-conspirator that he cooked cocaine into crack for defendant was reasonable basis on which to charge defendant with that amount of crack), cert. denied, 119 S. Ct. 607 (1998); United States v. Cantley, 130 F.3d 1371, 1378-79 (10th Cir. 1997) (multiple police officers and lay witnesses who purchased substance from, or sold substance to, defendant testified that substance was crack), cert. denied, 118 S. Ct. 1098 (1998); United States v. Taylor, 116 F.3d 269, 273-74 (7th Cir. 1997) (drug supplier, purchasers, and assistants testified that substance was crack). 128 In sum, based on the amount of drugs discussed in intercepted conversations and on the reasonable estimate that if the conspiracy handled 111 kilograms of cocaine in four months, it handled 150 kilograms over thirty-one months, we conclude that the District Court did not clearly err in attributing 150 kilograms of powder cocaine and 1.5 kilograms of crack to Gibbs as a leader of the conspiracy. 129 The judgments of the District Court will be affirmed.