Opinion ID: 774509
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Calculation of Life Expectancy

Text: 7 Judge Duffy determined that, under the Sentencing Guidelines, defendants' crimes in Counts 1-6 & 8 merited a life sentence under Guideline § 2A1.1, the section that applies to first-degree murder and to arsons resulting in death. See United States v. Tocco, 135 F.3d 116, 130-31 (2d Cir. 1998); Guideline § 2K1.4(c) (cross-referencing homicide guidelines when death results from use of an explosive against property); id. § 2A1.1, cmt. n. 1 (noting that the first-degree murder guideline is appropriately applied to certain felony murders). At the time of defendants' crimes, however, the applicable penalty statute provided that a life sentence could be imposed only if so directed by the jury, see 18 U.S.C. § 34 (1993), and the jury in this case was not asked to consider whether such a sentence was appropriate. 8 In 1994, after the crimes but before sentencing, Congress amended the statute to delete the jury directive requirement, but Judge Duffy determined that he was bound by the earlier version of the statute, as we had strongly suggested in Tocco, 135 F.3d at 132. Accordingly, he followed the procedure, approved in Tocco, of imposing a term of years that, if defendants lived to exactly their life expectancy as of the time of sentencing, would expire one month before their deaths. Judge Duffy determined the appropriate length of sentence by assuming, first, that each defendant would live to the age expected of a white male member of the general United States population who was born in the same year as defendant, and, second, that each defendant would receive the maximum good time credit allowable, see 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b). The relevant life expectancies were derived from a federal vital statistics report. Appellants argue (a) that this method of calculating their sentence was unfair insofar as adding on expected good-time credit lengthened the sentence beyond their life expectancy and (b) that the life expectancy figures did not reflect the shorter life spans of non-white, foreign-born persons who spend substantial periods of time in prison. 9 We need not, however, delve into Judge Duffy's methods because appellants have no legal right to a sentence that is shorter than their correct life expectancy. While these appeals were pending, we held in United States v. Joyner, 201 F.3d 61 (2d Cir. 2000), that defendants, who were sentenced after the effective date of the 1994 amendments to § 34, could be sentenced to life in prison for pre-amendment crimes even absent a jury directive. In Joyner we reasoned that the amendment in question affected only the division of labor between judge and jury, and not the maximum penalty authorized by law. See id. at80. Accordingly, since defendants had no right to avoid a sentence that was tantamount to life imprisonment, any errors in calculating their sentences were harmless.