Opinion ID: 1212381
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The district court properly declined to group counts one and two.

Text: Liddell claims the district court should have grouped counts one and two together before determining whether he was a career offender. We review the court's decision not to group these counts de novo. United States v. Alcala, 352 F.3d 1153, 1156 (7th Cir.2003); United States v. Sherman, 268 F.3d 539, 545 (7th Cir.2001). Liddell seems to believe (but doesn't explicitly argue) that if the counts are grouped, his two intervening state convictions would no longer be prior felony convictions because they would occur after the earlier of the two grouped offenses, and so Liddell could not be sentenced as a career offender. We do not agree, however, that grouping the two counts would change Liddell's career offender status. Even if the two counts were grouped, we would use the date of the later offense in the group in determining whether the unrelated state felony convictions were prior to the group. See United States v. Belton, 890 F.2d 9, 10 (7th Cir.1989) (Nothing in the guidelines' definition of a career offender requires . . . that every act constitutive of the offense underlying his current conviction have been committed after the prior conviction, and we can think of no reason for such a requirement.). We have suggested that an unrelated felony conviction is prior to a conspiracy for purposes of the career offender guidelines when the conspiracy begins before the conviction and continues afterward. Id. at 10-11; see also United States v. Garecht, 183 F.3d 671, 675 (7th Cir.1999) (modifying Belton by holding that a felony conviction that occurs during an ongoing conspiracy can be a prior conviction only if it is unrelated to the conspiracy). Similarly, it makes sense that an unrelated felony conviction is prior to a group of offenses if the conviction occurs before at least one of the offenses in the group. To hold otherwise would lead to a nonsensical resultLiddell would be better off because he was charged with two grouped offenses that straddled his unrelated state felony convictions than if he had been charged on just count one (which involved the later-occurring offense in the group). See Belton, 890 F.2d at 10-11 (noting that [t]he only practical effect of a similar argument in the drug conspiracy context would be to give the government an incentive to seek conviction for only so much of the defendant's participation in the continuing conspiracy as postdated his prior conviction). At any rate, we already explained why count one and count two are unrelated and should not be grouped together: Liddell's state incarceration separated the conduct charged in Count One from the conduct charged in both his state conviction and in Count Two, [so] we find that those earlier offenses are not related to Count One.... The guidelines explicitly state that district courts should compute sentencing guideline ranges on a count-by-count basis. See U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1(d); see also United States v. De la Torre, 327 F.3d 605, 609 (7th Cir.2003).... Liddell [should have been] sentenced as a career offender for [count one] and not [count two]. To hold otherwise not only would conflict with the guidelines, but it would strain judicial resources by forcing the government to bring multiple, separate indictments against defendants like Liddell to ensure that such defendants do not get a more lenient sentence simply because all of their offenses are consolidated in a single indictment. Liddell, 492 F.3d at 924. Although Liddell claims the law of the case doctrine doesn't preclude us from changing this decision, he hasn't provided a good reason for us to revisit the issue. And the two federal drug chargeswhich are based on incidents separated by more than two-and-a-half yearsdo not involve the same victim or the same transaction, and do not seem to be otherwise related. See U.S.S.G. § 3D1.2. Therefore, we conclude the district court correctly determined that the counts should not be grouped.