Opinion ID: 1025675
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Misapplying Irvin

Text: First, the majority repeats Collins' mistake in presuming that anything in Irvin compels the rule that conspiracy liability is dependent upon an individual conspiracy defendant's substantive acts. In Irvin, we held that in order to properly sentence defendants convicted of drug conspiracies under 21 U.S.C. §§ 846 and 841(a), the sentencing judge must make individualized assessments of relevant offense conduct to determine the quantity of narcotics reasonably foreseeable to each coconspirator within the scope of his agreement. Irvin, 2 F.3d at 78. The quantity found by the district court under this approach was then used to determine both the applicable penalty range from 21 U.S.C. § 841(b) and the applicable (and then-mandatory) range of punishment under the Sentencing Guidelines. This was entirely consistent with the governing practice at that time, several years before the Supreme Court's ruling in Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 120 S.Ct. 2348, 147 L.Ed.2d 435 (2000). In Irvin, we rejected the government's argument that § 846 required the district court to determine the applicable provision of § 841(b) by finding the drug quantity at the heart of the offense that was the object of the conspiracy and then applying that amount to every member of the conspiracy for purposes of sentencing. Id. at 75-77. The Irvin court based its holding on its understanding that Congress' intent in passing § 846 was not to increase exposure for criminal punishment beyond that already available, but `to synchronize the penalties for conspiracies and their underlying offenses . . . [by] ensur[ing] that a defendant who is charged with only conspiracy not be in a better position for sentencing than one who is charged solely with possession of the same amount of narcotics.' Id. at 77 (quoting United States v. Martinez, 987 F.2d 920, 925 (2d Cir.1993)) (omission and alterations in original). A proper understanding of Irvin 's holding must take account of the fact that at the time it was decided, there was but a single statutory offense under § 841(a), regardless of drug quantity, and the question of which provision of § 841(b) applied was merely one of sentencing, not one of which offense was committed. Therefore, any defendant convicted of a substantive violation of § 841(a), or of conspiracy under § 846 to commit a substantive violation of § 841(a), was exposed, statutorily, to the full range of punishment outlined in § 841(b), from zero to life imprisonment. But as noted, the Sentencing Guidelines at the time were mandatory. The post-conviction judicial factfinding called for under that system greatly narrowed the permissible range of punishment, and the district court's factfinding under the Guidelines served to fix both the applicable penalty range under § 841(b) and the mandatory Guidelines range. Irvin, 2 F.3d at 78. Admittedly, these two facts  the existence of mandatory Sentencing Guidelines and the lack of a particular provision of § 841(b) that applied as an element of the offense to the conspiracy as a whole  may well have led to substantially varying sentences among coconspirators commensurate with their level of involvement in the conspiracy and specifically with the amount of conspiratorial activity reasonably foreseeable to them. Nonetheless, this wide range of sentences for members of a single conspiracy did not violate the principles of conspiracy law because of the conceptual paradigm reigning at that time: a defendant's conviction under §§ 846 and 841(a) was for the single offense of conspiracy to distribute narcotics, without regard to drug quantity. Therefore, any subsequent determination of drug quantity  whether to determine the appropriate category of § 841(b) or to apply the then-mandatory Guidelines  was wholly related to sentencing and had no bearing whatsoever on the defendant's criminal liability for the conspiracy itself or on the nature of the conspiracy's object offense. Irvin was thus concerned only with what facts regarding drug quantity needed to be found for sentencing after the jury returned an undifferentiated conviction for conspiracy  that is, a conspiracy conviction that made no findings about drug quantity. It was therefore error for the Collins court to have applied Irvin 's holding from the pre- Apprendi and pre- Promise era, when § 841(a) described a single offense and § 841(b) merely contained sentencing factors for the district court to consider, as if it survived the post- Apprendi and post- Promise era, when § 841(a) was found to describe three separate and distinct offenses, based on the determination of § 841(b) threshold drug quantity by the jury as an element of the offense. Once the threshold drug quantities specified in § 841(b)(1)(A), (B), and (C) became elements of three separate offenses, rather than mere sentencing factors, Irvin no longer controlled their proper application. Thus, Collins was wrong in blindly following Irvin, and the majority is wrong in blindly following Collins.