Opinion ID: 223527
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Handley's Separate Claims

Text: Handley challenges only his sentence on appeal. As do many of his co-defendants, he contends that the district court failed to properly articulate its findings that his coconspirators' conduct was relevant to his offense. He also contends that those findings were not based upon sufficient evidence. Because of these errors, he concludes, we must remand his case for resentencing. Once again, we review de novo the district court's application of the sentencing guidelines, and we review its factual findings for clear error. Nance, 611 F.3d at 415. Much like Lechuga claims to have done, Handley apparently tried to distance himself from the Insane Deuces during the summer of 2002. Though he was once a very active Deuce, Handley's participation waned so far that his fellow gang members issued a smash on sight or SOS order against him in late 2002 or early 2003, meaning that anyone who ran into him should physically beat him to punish his lack of involvement. The government did not present any evidence that Handley had actual knowledge of or personally participated in any acts of violence after the summer of 2002. Regardless, the government and the PSR recommended holding him accountable for the gang's subsequent violent acts. Handley argued, both in his objections to the PSR and during the sentencing hearing, that the circumstances showed he had not agreed to the full scope of the gang's racketeering conspiracy and that the violent acts during and after the summer of 2002 were not in furtherance of his jointly undertaken criminal activity. He also argued that the evidence linking him to any violent acts prior to that time was inherently unreliable due to the lack of cross-examination and many indications of poor credibility. Handley's arguments did not convince the district court. The district court noted that, while no evidence showed Handley's direct participation in violence, the evidence did demonstrate that Handley knew of the many violent acts, was present during multiple discussions of actions against rival gang members, and went along with it all without making known the fact that he allegedly abhorred violence. The district court found that Handley had been an Insane Deuce from the age of 14 in 1999 until 2003, when he first attempted to walk away according to his own post-arrest statement. The district court did, however, find that Handley unquestionably attempted to minimize his participation in the enterprise near the end of his membership. Based on Handley's post-arrest statement, cooperating witness testimony, and statements from one of the co-conspirators tried in the first trial, the district court found that Handley was involved in certain missions and that he was a full member of the conspiracy, and that he [was] therefore responsible for the actions of the co-conspirators for which he could have ... reasonably been aware of, and so it can be said that this was within his agreement with the gang. The court specifically found that the SOS order issued in 2003, far after the facts involved in the case under consideration. It therefore determined that, based on the relevant conduct of his co-conspirators, Handley's total offense level was 43. The district court confirmed that it was agreeing with the PSR and its guideline calculations. On appeal, Handley renews his contention that the evidence upon which the district court based its findings was inherently unreliable. He also contends that the district court's relevant conduct findings were insufficient because they neither specified the scope of Handley's jointly undertaken activity nor described those acts of his co-conspirators that furthered that joint undertaking. We reject the latter contention, as we are satisfied that the district court's findings  though terse  sufficiently articulated its reasons for finding the conduct of Handley's co-conspirators relevant to his offense. See United States v. Singleton, 548 F.3d 589, 593 (7th Cir.2008) (describing our reluctance to reject a district court's relevant conduct findings for failure to invoke section 1B1.3's magic words). The district court's findings were informed both by counsel's arguments regarding the scope of the joint undertaking and by the calculations and reasoning in the PSR that it ultimately adopted during the sentencing hearing. See United States v. Acosta, 85 F.3d 275, 279-80 (7th Cir.1996) (no clear error in implicit relevant conduct finding where record shows the district court considered and adopted PSR recommendations and government's reasoning regarding the facts related by the PSR). The district court's statement, while perhaps ineloquently phrased, suggests that it found the scope of Handley's criminal undertaking to be coextensive with that of the entire racketeering enterprise. It undoubtedly found that the scope was broad enough to include the co-conspirators' criminal acts at issue. While the district court may not have defined the nebulous outermost limits of the scope of Handley's joint criminal activities, it did find that the scope at least included the acts of violence at issue and that his co-conspirators' acts were reasonably foreseeable to Handley. The district court's statement quoted above does not suggest to us that the district court erroneously determined the scope of Handley's undertaking, as Handley suggests, by considering foreseeability first or exclusively. Further, Handley makes no argument that the violent acts in question were not in furtherance of the overall conspiracy. We therefore conclude that the district court's findings sufficed for purposes of section 1B1.3  provided that those findings rested on sufficient, reliable evidence. See United States v. England, 555 F.3d 616, 622 (7th Cir.2009) ([D]ue process requires that sentencing determinations be based on reliable evidence, not speculation or unfounded allegations.). We turn, then, to Handley's contention that the evidence the district court relied on in making its relevant conduct findings was unreliable. Handley argues that the government relied on testimony from cooperating witnesses Becerra and Juan Osorio  who testified that Handley personally participated in some violent acts  despite the fact that their testimony was highly questionable and subject to considerable dispute. He also argues that the only evidence the district court appeared to rely on was a government-provided memorandum summarizing co-conspirator Fernando Delatorre's post-arrest statements and grand jury testimony. Handley asserts that the reliance was inherently unreasonable because the district court did not have time to review the memorandum in its entirety; because Delatorre, at that time, thought he stood to benefit from each allegation he made against his fellow gang members; because Delatorre later implicitly repudiated the testimony by going to trial; because the sentencing court never had the opportunity to observe Delatorre; and because the memorandum comprised conclusory statements of verification from law enforcement officials. The district court did not enter any explicit findings as to the credibility of declarants or witnesses or as to what conflicting evidence it found to be reliable and supportive of its determinations. Handley therefore concludes that we must remand for resentencing. We agree that we must remand for a new sentencing hearing [i]f the district court relied on unreliable or inaccurate information in making its sentencing decision. England, 555 F.3d at 622. But we do not conclude that the district court did so here. Sentencing courts may consider relevant information without regard to its admissibility under the rules of evidence... provided that the information has sufficient indicia of reliability to support its probable accuracy. U.S.S.G. § 6A1.3. The district court was in a good position to judge the credibility of Becerra and Osorio, whose trial testimony implicated Handley in two attempted murders. The district court also heard a candid conversation between Delatorre and Rivera, covertly recorded long before Delatorre knew of the impending arrests, in which Delatorre implicated Handley in another attempted murder. Handley makes much of the district court's reference to the Delatorre memorandum during sentencing, but the district court was well informed regarding Delatorre's credibility issues. It knew that Delatorre chose to stand trial instead of reaching a plea agreement after making his self-serving grand jury statements, and Handley's counsel extensively attacked Delatorre's credibility at the sentencing hearing. The memorandum also summarized the results of an investigation to verify Delatorre's statements; it was not merely a recitation of his testimony from the grand jury. Moreover, the district court also relied on Handley's own post-arrest statement in reaching its findings, including his concession of having been the Shorty Enforcer in 2002. Handley's arguments do not convince us that all of the evidence before the sentencing court was inherently unreliable. The district court could have been more specific in outlining what evidence it relied upon and why it found that evidence particularly reliable. Still, the record suggests that the relevant evidence was reliable and that the district court adequately considered the conflicting evidence. See United States v. Johnson, 643 F.3d 545, 552 (7th Cir.2011). We are not left with the definite and firm conviction that the district court erred in its relevant conduct determinations, so we will affirm Handley's sentence.