Opinion ID: 714835
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Quantity of Drugs Involved in Conspiracy

Text: 56 The defendants challenge the quantity of drugs that the district court found attributable to the conspiracy and used in calculating the base offense levels for the defendants. The estimate adopted by the court, 20.5 kilograms of crack cocaine, was derived from Mr. Mills' post-arrest statement. The defendants submit that the Mills statement does not exhibit a sufficient degree of reliability and thus cannot serve as a basis from which to estimate the quantity of drugs involved in the conspiracy. 57 The estimate adopted by the court was taken from the Presentence Report, which in turn relied upon an estimate from the Government's Presentence Submission. The government, in its Submission, based its estimate of the total quantity of drugs involved upon the statement given by Mr. Mills following his arrest in September 1993. In that statement, Mr. Mills recounted his involvement with the conspiracy and described the quantities of drugs with which he dealt. Starting in the summer of 1992, Mr. Mills began to deliver the prepackaged crack cocaine to the locations at which it was to be sold. The report, based upon his post-arrest interview, stated that he would usually take 5 to 10 packs (35 bags in each pack) at a time to the location where the sellers where [sic] selling. He said that he would usually do this 2 to 3 times a day, but on a good sales day he would do this five times a day. R.117. Based upon this statement, the government's Presentence Submission assumed, conservatively, that Mr. Mills delivered an average of seven packs, each containing thirty-five bags of crack cocaine, twice a day from July 1992 through April 1993. Government's Presentence Submission at 34. If each pack contained 4.9 grams of crack cocaine, 15 then the Mills statement indicates that he delivered a total of 20,580 grams (20.5 kilos) of crack to the street dealers. This estimate, under United States Sentencing Guideline § 2D1.1(c)(1), resulted in a base offense level of 42. 16 See U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(c)(1) (1993). 58 The quantity of drugs involved in a conspiracy must be established by a preponderance of the evidence, United States v. Johnson, 32 F.3d 265, 268 (7th Cir.1994), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 1172, 130 L.Ed.2d 1125 (1995), and the evidence upon which a court is entitled to rely when making its sentencing determinations must have sufficient indicia of reliability to support its probable accuracy. United States v. Buggs, 904 F.2d 1070, 1080 (7th Cir.1990). We review for clear error the sentencing court's determination, under the Sentencing Guidelines, of this quantity. United States v. Berchiolly, 67 F.3d 634, 639 (7th Cir.1995). We shall reverse the sentencing court's determination of the drug quantity only if we are left with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made. Id. (quoting United States v. Corral-Ibarra, 25 F.3d 430, 437 (7th Cir.1994)). 59 The defendants claim that the Mills statement, relied upon by the sentencing court, is inherently unreliable. Yet the district court accepted the testimony and found it to be a credible basis upon which to base its sentencing decisions. We cannot hold that this decision was clearly erroneous. The statement made by Mr. Mills was admitted into evidence at trial through the testimony of Officer Grapenthien, whose demeanor the court had the opportunity to observe. The court's decision to credit his testimony, and thus the content of the Mills statement, is not one which we find to be clearly erroneous. Furthermore, the 20.5 kilos found by the district court to be attributable to the conspiracy may actually be a conservative estimate when viewed in light of the evidence that was presented at trial. For example, the estimation of the drug quantity involved assumed that the conspiracy operated between July 1992 and April 1993, but the evidence at trial established that Mr. Banks began his initial purchases of cocaine powder in the fall of 1991 and that the conspiracy operated until as late as the summer of 1993. Additionally, the calculated amount does not include the half kilogram of crack cocaine that Mr. Mills threw from his car during the May 11 car chase. We thus hold that the district court's finding of 20.5 kilos is not based upon unreliable evidence, nor is it clearly erroneous.