Opinion ID: 198229
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Disparate Sentencing/Prosecutorial Discretion Claim

Text: 105 Defendants Rosario and Famania argue that they should be resentenced because their sentences were significantly higher than those of their co-conspirators who pled guilty rather than choosing to go to trial. They claim that the disparity in sentencing constituted an impermissible burden on their Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial and violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution. 106 The government indicted six defendants, charging all of them with engaging in the same conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. The district court found this conspiracy accountable for the distribution of approximately 5,000 grams of crack cocaine over a 36-week period. At sentencing, the court held Rosario and Famania accountable for all 5,000 grams of the crack cocaine. In contrast, the district court accepted the agreement of the three defendants who had pled guilty--Carvajal, De Jess, and Villafane--which was based on responsibility only for the amount of drugs which each had personally handled. Carvajal, for example, was held accountable for 5 to 20 grams of crack cocaine. This disparity in the drug-quantity attribution led to an even more striking disparity in sentencing, which is the subject of the defendants' complaint. Carvajal was sentenced to the time he had already served, De Jess to 17 months of imprisonment, and Villafane to 60 months of imprisonment. Famania was sentenced to 235 months of imprisonment, and Rosario to 262 months of imprisonment. Rodrguez, who was also charged with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, was sentenced to life imprisonment. 107 The thrust of the defendants' complaint is that this vast disparity in sentencing--a difference of more than 21 years between Carvajal and Rosario, for example--is an inevitable consequence of the application of a different drug-quantity attribution algorithm for those defendants who plead guilty as opposed to those who did not. They identify the plea-bargaining practice of the Office of the United States Attorney as the source of this disparity. The defendants claim that the U.S. Attorney fashioned plea agreements with the pleading defendants which attributed to them an amount of drugs no greater than the amount for which the pleading defendants were personally responsible, or had personally handled. Those who did not plead guilty but exercised their right to go to trial, by contrast, had attributed to them all of the drugs that could be accounted to the entire conspiracy. Those who chose to go to trial, therefore, were necessarily sentenced on the basis of a far greater amount of drugs than those who pled guilty. According to the defendants, this practice discriminates against those who exercise their right to a jury trial. 108 The government, which characterizes the defendants' argument as an improper motion for a downward departure from the applicable sentencing range, argues that we have no jurisdiction to consider the defendants' complaint because the disparate sentences of co-conspirators do not provide a basis for resentencing. The government further asserts that even if this court did have jurisdiction, it should find no constitutional violation because the sentences of the pleading defendants were properly based on their plea agreements and allowed by U.S.S.G. § 1B1.8(a). 109 We begin, as we must, with the government's jurisdictional objection. It is settled that we have no appellate jurisdiction to review a sentence within the applicable sentencing guidelines range if that range was correctly determined. United States v. Panet-Collazo, 960 F.2d 256, 261 (1st Cir.1992). The defendants' argument is focused on the argued unconstitutional effects of the practices that led to the imposition of such disparate sentences. They do not say that their sentences were improperly calculated. Instead, they claim that the pleabargaining practice of the U.S. Attorney's Office puts undue pressure on defendants, such as Rosario and Famania, to waive their right to a trial and violates Due Process and Equal Protection principles. Because there is no jurisdictional barrier to such an argument, we evaluate the defendants' argument. 110 The defendants' challenge to the plea-bargaining practice of the U.S. Attorney here finds little support in the law. We begin by noting that prosecutorial charging, plea, and motion practices are ... a well-spring of sentencing disparity.... In the federal system, prosecutors have always enjoyed great discretion in deciding what cases to pursue and what charges to bring. Kate Stith & Jose A. Cabranes, Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts 140-41 (1998). As Professor Stith and Judge Cabranes state: 111 The major reason that such broad [prosecutorial] discretion has been accorded to prosecutors is the large number and complexity of factors that prosecutors must (legitimately) take into account in making charging and other decisions. These include many considerations that the Sentencing Guidelines, or any other sentencing authority, would recognize as relevant also to sentencing--including the nature and seriousness of the offense, the deterrent effect of prosecution, the defendant's culpability in the offense, the defendant's criminal history and a wide range of other personal circumstances, the charges against accomplices in the crime, and the defendant's willingness to cooperate in the prosecution of others. In addition, prosecutors must pay attention to a variety of considerations that sentencing authorities ordinarily do not take into account after the defendant has been convicted--the strength or paucity of the admissible evidence, the priority accorded by the federal government as well as by the local community to prosecution of the particular offense, the capability and availability of prosecutorial resources and adjunct investigatory resources, the alternatives to prosecution, and the likelihood of prosecution in another jurisdiction. 112 Id. at 141. 113 The government, it appears, negotiated plea bargains with some of the defendants and promised, according to U.S.S.G. § 1B1.8(a), not to use any of the information provided by cooperating defendants against them. The government then charged each of them only with the amount of drugs they had personally handled, rather than the entire amount distributed by the conspiracy. This practice led to the enormous sentencing disparity for the defendants who chose to put the government to its burden in proving its case. Nevertheless, the law allows the government to do this, even if it results in sentences of such disparity as would strike many as unfair. 2 114 The fact that those who plead generally receive more lenient treatment, or at least a government recommendation of more lenient treatment than co-defendants who go to trial, does not in and of itself constitute an unconstitutional burden on one's right to go to trial and prove its case. See Corbitt v. New Jersey, 439 U.S. 212, 219, 99 S.Ct. 492, 58 L.Ed.2d 466 (1978) (noting that every burden on the exercise of a constitutional right is not invalid and that there is no per se rule against encouraging guilty pleas, even where those pleas promise the certainty of a lesser penalty). To be sure, the differential which resulted here exacts a high price from those who exercise their constitutional right to trial, but the price is not high enough to constitute a constitutional violation. 115 Corbitt provides guidance on this issue. In Corbitt, the Court addressed a claim under the New Jersey homicide statutes, which mandated life imprisonment for a jury conviction of first-degree murder and a maximum term of 30 years' imprisonment for a jury conviction of second-degree murder. Although guilty pleas were not permitted in murder cases, a plea of non vult (or nolo contendere ) was allowed. If such a plea was accepted, the judge would not need to decide whether the murder was first or second-degree, but could sentence the defendant to either life imprisonment or to the same sentence that would be imposed for second-degree murder (i.e., a maximum of 30 years' imprisonment). See id. at 214-15, 99 S.Ct. 492. The Court rejected the claim that because a plea of non vult might produce a lesser sentence than going to trial, the statutes imposed an unconstitutional burden on the defendant's right to a jury trial and violated his right to equal protection under the laws. See id. at 218, 99 S.Ct. 492. The Court, quoting its earlier decision in Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U.S. 357, 98 S.Ct. 663, 54 L.Ed.2d 604 (1978), explained that: 116 While confronting a defendant with the risk of more severe punishment clearly may have a discouraging effect on the defendant's assertion of his trial rights, the imposition of these difficult choices [is] an inevitable--and permissible--attribute of any legitimate system which tolerates and encourages the negotiation of pleas. It follows that, by tolerating and encouraging the negotiation of pleas, this Court has necessarily accepted as constitutionally legitimate the simple reality that the prosecutor's interest at the bargaining table is to persuade the defendant to forgo his right to plead not guilty. 117 Corbitt, 439 U.S. at 220-21, 99 S.Ct. 492 (quoting Bordenkircher, 434 U.S. at 364, 98 S.Ct. 663) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The Court also indicated that the defendant's reliance on United States v. Jackson, 390 U.S. 570, 88 S.Ct. 1209, 20 L.Ed.2d 138 (1968), was inapposite. See Corbitt, 439 U.S. at 216-17, 99 S.Ct. 492. 118 In Jackson, the Court found that one portion of the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a), needlessly chilled the exercise of one's right to a jury trial. See Jackson, 390 U.S. at 582, 88 S.Ct. 1209. Corbitt distinguished Jackson, and thus its rule, on several grounds. Jackson involved the death penalty, which is unique in its severity and irrevocability. Corbitt, 439 U.S. at 217, 99 S.Ct. 492 (quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976)). The pressures in Corbitt, which compared to those stemming from the practice alleged here, were substantial, but they did not rise to the level of those in Jackson. See id. at 217, 99 S.Ct. 492 (declining to hold that the Jackson rationale is limited to those cases where the plea avoids any possibility of the death penalty's being imposed, but noting that it is a material fact that under the New Jersey law the maximum penalty for murder is life imprisonment, not death). 119 Further, in Jackson, all risk of receiving the death penalty could be avoided by pleading guilty. In Corbitt, although the punishment for a jury conviction of first-degree murder was life imprisonment, the risk of receiving the same punishment was not completely avoided by pleading non vult, as the judge accepting the plea still maintained the power to impose a life term. See Corbitt, 439 U.S. at 217, 99 S.Ct. 492. The defendants here, of course, cannot avoid the imposition of a significantly greater sentence without pleading guilty, but that fact alone cannot help these defendants to avoid Corbitt and bring their case within the ambit of Jackson. 120 The defendants do not dispute that a conspirator may be held responsible for the reasonably foreseeable amount of drugs embraced by the jointly undertaken activity. See De La Cruz, 996 F.2d at 1314. It is, however, within the government's discretion to charge similarly situated defendants differently. 3 Only when a prosecutor discriminates against defendants based on impermissible criteria such as race or religion is a prosecutor's discretion subject to review and rebuke. See Bordenkircher, 434 U.S. at 364, 98 S.Ct. 663 (noting that the conscious exercise of some selectivity in enforcement is not in itself a federal constitutional violation so long as the selection was [not] deliberately based upon an unjustifiable standard such as race, religion, or other arbitrary classification) (internal quotation marks omitted); cf. Corbitt, 439 U.S. at 225-26, 99 S.Ct. 492 (holding that there was no Equal Protection violation where those who pled guilty could potentially serve the same sentence as those who chose to contest their guilt, and asserting that to fit the problem ... into an equal protection framework is a task too Procrustean to be rationally accomplished) (citation omitted). 121 To the extent that the defendants' argument can be characterized as seeking to equalize their sentences with those of their co-defendants, their argument, without more, will not permit a departure from a properly calculated guideline sentencing range. United States v. Wogan, 938 F.2d 1446 (1st Cir.1991); see United States v. Pierro, 32 F.3d 611, 622 (1st Cir.1994)(same); United States v. Figueroa, 976 F.2d 1446, 1460 (1st Cir.1992); United States v. Butt, 955 F.2d 77, 90 (1st Cir.1992); see also United States v. Jackson, 950 F.2d 633, 637-38 (10th Cir.1991) (Because Jackson's claim is based solely on the lesser sentence imposed on his codefendant and because his sentence falls within the range established by the Sentencing Guidelines, we must reject this claim....); United States v. Carpenter, 914 F.2d 1131, 1136 (9th Cir.1990) (holding that a defendant cannot base a challenge to his sentence solely on the lesser sentence given by the district court to his codefendant); United States v. Guerrero, 894 F.2d 261, 267 (7th Cir.1990) (stating that there is nothing in the legislative history suggesting that the sentences within the Guidelines should be reviewed because of a claim that a particular sentence is draconian or too lenient); United States v. Sanchez Solis, 882 F.2d 693, 699 (2d Cir.1989) (rejecting defendant's claim that a disparity in sentences violates the Sentencing Reform Act and rejecting his suggestion that he was penalized for exercising his right to a trial).