Opinion ID: 2995149
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Length of Sentence in Excess of Life

Text: Expectancy Lastly, Spiller argues that his Eighth Amendment rights/9 were violated when the district court denied his motion for downward departure and sentenced him to 352 months (29.33 years), a sentence exceeding his life expectancy of 16.96 years. We lack jurisdiction to review a district court’s refusal to make a downward departure, unless the sentence is imposed in violation of the law or as a result of an incorrect application of the Sentencing Guidelines. See Johnson, 227 F.3d at 816. Spiller states that he is not making an age-based downward departure request (which would preclude our review of the district court’s decision), but rather argues that the sentence was imposed in violation of the law, specifically 21 U.S.C. sec. 841(b)(1)(c), which states that a person shall be sentenced to a term of not . . . more than life. (emphasis added). Spiller argues that any sentence in excess of his life expectancy is more than life and therefore prohibited under the statute. In support of his position, Spiller cites to Martin, 63 F.3d at 1434, where this court held that where a legislatively enacted sentencing scheme has expressly deprived a court of the possibility of imposing a life sentence, a sentence for a term of years exceeding the defendant’s approximate life expectancy would ordinarily constitute an abuse of discretion. The district court rejected Spiller’s argument, concluding that Martin applied in only limited circumstances. In Martin, the court sentenced a 45-year-old defendant to a 50-year prison term pursuant to 18 U.S.C. sec. 34, following his arson conviction under 18 U.S.C. sec. 844(i). At the time of Martin’s trial, Section 34 provided that imposing a sentence of life imprisonment (or the death penalty) must be left to the discretion of the jury./10 Where the jury declined to direct life imprisonment, we found that the district court abused its discretion in circumventing that decision by imposing a sentence so long that it effectively amounted to a life sentence under another name. Id. at 1434. Even in the text of that case, however, we limited its applicability, noting that the later amendment to Section 34 renders this case something of an historical oddity whose precise holding may have a limited reach. Martin, 63 F.3d at 1432 n.6. See also United States v. Prevatte, 66 F.3d 840, 844 (7th Cir. 1995) (when sentencing a defendant under Section 34, [d]etermining the life expectancy of the individual defendant is a matter that ought to be addressed by the district court.). We have since noted the limited scope of Martin and Prevatte. For example, in United States v. DiDomenico, 78 F.3d 294, 298 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 519 U.S. 1006 (1996), the defendants were not sentenced pursuant to Section 34 and thus we dismissed their life expectancy arguments as frivolous. Even under the Martin analysis, the sentencing scheme of 21 U.S.C. sec. 841(b)(1)(c) does not expressly deprive a court of the possibility of imposing a life sentence. Consequently, here, the district judge was free to impose any sentence under the statutory maximum and within the guideline range that he deemed to be appropriate in the proper exercise of his discretion. Accordingly, we reject Spiller’s argument that because a particular sentence would be the equivalent of a life sentence, he is entitled to a downward departure. To hold otherwise would be to require that the sentencing judge consider in every case a defendant’s life expectancy and we decline to impose such an onerous burden