Opinion ID: 798531
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: If the defendant was a manger or

Text: supervisor (but not an organizer or leader) and the criminal activity involved five or more participants or was otherwise 28 extensive, increase by 3 levels. U.S.S.G. §§ 3B1.1(a), (b). Benavides claims that because the second hanging sentence uses the conjunction “and” to separate its first two clauses, the defendant need not have direct control over all five culpable participants for the enhancement to apply. Conversely, the first hanging sentence does not use “and” to separate its two clauses, which, according to Benavides, makes the numerosity requirement apply to both the criminal activity as a whole and to the phrase “organizer or leader.” It is true enough the two sections use different phrasing. But while § 3B1.1(b) uses “and” to separate its first two clauses, § 3B1.1(a) achieves the same effect by using the relative pronoun “that.” Indeed, the word “that” stands in place of the noun immediately preceding it, which, in this case, is “activity.” Applying this grammar and usage rule, the second clause in § 3B1.1(a) only requires that the criminal activity involved five or more people. It does not, as Benavides claims, modify the entire “organizer or leader” clause to require direct authority over those other people.9 Benavides’ linguistic argument thus fails, and the district court’s 9 To put it more simply, Benavides wants the court to read subsection (a) once and then again—the second time with an ellipses so as to require the defendant to be “an organizer or leader of . . . five or more participants” before the district court can impose the four-level enhancement. As explained above, this would violate well-established grammatical and usage rules. 29 decision to apply the four-level enhancement is affirmed.