Opinion ID: 711611
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Paul Mousseau

Text: 12 The district court held Paul Mousseau responsible for more than 1,600 doses of LSD and sentenced him to a term of 135 months of imprisonment. We affirmed his conviction on appeal but recalculated the drug amounts for which he was responsible. Although we recognized that Mousseau ultimately received all the drugs he sold from the conspiracy's ringleader, Timothy Galbraith, we found Mousseau responsible for no more than 1,475.5 doses of LSD because the statements of Mousseau's immediate supplier indicated that Mousseau received less LSD than the district court credited to him. We therefore remanded his case to the district court for resentencing consistent with the recalculated LSD figure. 13 The district court resentenced Mousseau and applied this circuit's dual-rule sentencing scheme. First, the district court computed Mousseau's sentence under the amended guidelines. The court multiplied 1,457.5 by Amendment 488's standardized 0.4 milligram carrier medium weight to get 583 milligrams of LSD. The resulting drug quantity requires a Base Offense Level of 20. Given Mousseau's Criminal History Category Level II, his guideline sentencing range was thirty-seven to forty-six months. Mousseau does not dispute these computations. Next, the court computed Mousseau's sentence under Sec. 841(b)(1)(B)(v)'s five-year statutory mandatory minimum by including the actual weight of the carrier medium. The court computed the weight of Mousseau's LSD in the following manner: Of the 1457.5 doses for which he was held responsible, only sixteen were actually in the possession of the government (Mousseau sold these doses to police informants). Including the carrier medium, these sixteen doses weighed 99.415 milligrams. Thus, one dose of this LSD weighed just over six milligrams. From this, the district court extrapolated that all the 1457.5 doses Mousseau sold must also have each weighed six milligrams. The district court therefore multiplied 1457.5 by six and determined that Mousseau was responsible for 8,745 milligrams, or 8.7 grams, of LSD. Because this amount was more than one gram of LSD but less than ten grams, the district court held that the statutory mandatory minimum five-year term applied and trumped the lesser sentencing guideline range, and Mousseau received a five-year sentence. 14 On appeal, Mousseau contends that it was error for the district court to rely upon the weight of only sixteen doses of LSD in computing the total weight of all 1457.5 doses for purposes of sentencing under Sec. 841. He argues that because the court knew the actual weight of only sixteen LSD doses, the court should have multiplied each remaining dose by Amendment 488's standard carrier medium 0.4 multiplier, not an extrapolated 6.0 multiplier. If the court had utilized the 0.4 milligram multiplier, the weight of the drugs for which Mousseau was responsible would not be enough to trigger any statutory mandatory minimum so as to trump application of the lower sentencing guideline range. 15 It was not error for the district court to assign a weight of 6.0 milligrams to each dose of LSD not in the government's possession. A district court's decision as to the amount of drugs for which a defendant is responsible must stand unless clearly erroneous. United States v. Ward, 68 F.3d 146, 149 (6th Cir.1995). Moreover, [a]n approximation by a court is not clearly erroneous if it is supported by competent evidence in the record. Id. at 149. In this case, the district court's determination of drug quantity was not clearly erroneous where it approximated the weight of individual drugs not in evidence by extrapolating from the weight of drugs actually obtained from defendant where all the drugs at issue had a common supplier.