Court Opinion

ID: 9945889
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-28 19:01:07.773265+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:22:40.450471
License: Public Domain

In the
    United States Court of Appeals
                 For the Seventh Circuit
                     ____________________

No. 21-3372
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
                                                   Plaintiff-Appellee,
                                 v.

BENJAMIN BIANCOFIORI,
                                               Defendant-Appellant.
                     ____________________

         Appeal from the United States District Court for the
           Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
          No. 16 CR 306-1 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge.
                     ____________________

SUBMITTED FEBRUARY 26, 2024 — DECIDED FEBRUARY 28, 2024
                ____________________

   Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and ST. EVE,
Circuit Judges.
    EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. A jury convicted Benjamin
Biancoﬁori of sex traﬃcking by force, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§1591, and he was sentenced to 360 months in prison plus su-
pervised release for life. The evidence permitted the jury to
ﬁnd that, between 2007 and 2016, Biancoﬁori compelled nine
adult women to engage in prostitution, beating them if they
tried to escape or failed to hand over their receipts. Details do
2                                                              No. 21-3372

not matter for current purposes. We address in this opinion
Biancoﬁori’s contention that §1591 covers only the sex traf-
ﬁcking of minors or is unconstitutional. We address his other
appellate arguments in a non-precedential order released
contemporaneously.
    Section 1591(a) reads:
      Sex traﬃcking of children or by force, fraud, or coercion
    (a) Whoever knowingly—
        (1) in or aﬀecting interstate or foreign commerce, or within
        the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United
        States, recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains,
        advertises, maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a
        person; or
        (2) beneﬁts, ﬁnancially or by receiving anything of value, from
        participation in a venture which has engaged in an act de-
        scribed in violation of paragraph (1),
    knowing, or, except where the act constituting the violation of
    paragraph (1) is advertising, in reckless disregard of the fact, that
    means of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion described in sub-
    section (e)(2), or any combination of such means will be used to
    cause the person to engage in a commercial sex act, or that the
    person has not attained the age of 18 years and will be caused to
    engage in a commercial sex act, shall be punished as provided in
    subsection (b).

The trailing paragraph makes traﬃcking of a minor an alter-
native to traﬃcking of “a person” by “force, threats of force,
fraud, coercion … or any combination of such means”. Either
traﬃcking through force or traﬃcking a minor suﬃces. And
if there were doubt (which there is not), the caption—“traf-
ﬁcking of children or by force” (emphasis added)—shows that
the language of the trailing paragraph is not some kind of gar-
ble. A statute’s caption cannot diminish the scope of the
No. 21-3372                                                       3

statute’s text, see Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542
U.S. 241, 256 (2004), but it can show that the text means what
it appears to say, as this caption does. The text and caption
together are suﬃciently clear that it would be unwarranted to
consider legislative history.
    Biancoﬁori insists that this straightforward reading of the
statute produces absurd results by penalizing the sex traﬃck-
ing of adults more harshly than the sex traﬃcking of minors.
Under subsection (b)(2), to which subsection (a) refers, the
minimum sentence for sex traﬃcking of a minor is 10 years’
imprisonment, while subsection (b)(1) provides for a 15-year
minimum sentence when the defendant traﬃcs any person by
force. We have two reactions.
   First, we do not see any incongruity in providing that us-
ing force increases the minimum sentence. Congress did not
take leave of its senses in providing that traﬃcking an 18-
year-old girl by beatings and other physical terror is more se-
rious than traﬃcking a 17-year-old girl without force.
    Second, Biancoﬁori supposes that judges should use their
own ideas of what is absurd or strange to override an explicit
statutory text. We held in Jaskolski v. Daniels, 427 F.3d 456, 461–
62 (7th Cir. 2005); United States v. Logan, 453 F.3d 804, 806 (7th
Cir. 2006), aﬃrmed, 552 U.S. 23 (2007); Spivey v. Vertrue, Inc.,
528 F.3d 982, 984–85 (7th Cir. 2008); and Soppet v. Enhanced Re-
covery Co., 679 F.3d 637 (7th Cir. 2012), that only linguistic ab-
surdity permits a corrective intervention; substantive matters
are for the legislature whether or not a judge ﬁnds the choice
hard to swallow. As we put it in Soppet, 679 F.3d at 642:
“[A]djudication is not the continuation of legislation by other
means.”
4                                                  No. 21-3372

    We could not ﬁnd any appellate decision holding that
§1591(a) is limited to the sex traﬃcking of minors. Nor could
we ﬁnd any precedential opinion holding the opposite,
though United States v. Cook, 782 F.3d 983 (8th Cir. 2015), is
close. But the argument has been made frequently in district
courts, and at least one district judge bought it. United States
v. Afyare, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86587 (M.D. Tenn. June 12,
2013), reversed, 632 Fed. App’x 272 (6th Cir. 2016). Although
the Sixth Circuit did not issue a precedential decision—appar-
ently believing the issue too clear for reasonable debate, see
632 Fed. App’x at 275–79—the fact that a patter of arguments
similar to Biancoﬁori’s continues in the district courts implies
the need to resolve the matter with precedential eﬀect.
    Biancoﬁori’s fallback is that §1591(a) is unconstitutionally
vague. For the reasons we have given, however, the statute’s
rule is well-deﬁned. Biancoﬁori’s argument relies on state-
ments in the legislative history, not on the statutory language.
Many a statement by many a legislator is vague, or does not
match the enacted statute, but that does not render invalid an
enacted text whose meaning is ascertainable. We do not per-
ceive any other plausible constitutional argument against the
statute’s application to Biancoﬁori.
                                                     AFFIRMED