Court Opinion

ID: 9499466
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:48:53.469432+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:31.195687
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
concurring separately.
As the majority states, op. at 640 n. 2, no appeal was taken regarding the reasonableness of May’s sentence of 262 months’ (21 years, 10 months’) imprisonment. Such an issue, if it were raised, likely would be unavailing. See United States v. Jones, 145 F.3d 959, 966 (8th Cir.1998) (Bright, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
However, as the dissenter against Jones’s sentence, I must observe that May, who like Jones was a minor offender who went to trial, received the heaviest sentence of his co-defendants, all of whom pleaded guilty. Here, the two principal members of the conspiracy received sentences of 220 months’ (18 years, 4 months’) imprisonment, and lesser members received sentences of 210 (17 years, 6 months), 70, 57, 50, 48, and 24 months.
In this case, as in other cases where the guidelines serve to measure a sentence, sometimes the less culpable receive heavier sentences. When a conspiracy exists, the entire weight of drugs can be attributable to all members. If a minor offender exercises his Constitutional right to a trial, the penalty of losing is a heavier sentence than others, who may be more culpable but plead guilty and provide useful information to the Government by informing on others. I continue to observe that,
[rjegrettably, the primary consideration under our present sentencing scheme is not criminality, but rather on the weight of the drugs charged to a defendant plus the information a defendant will give to his or her prosecutor.... For their part, the underlings are rarely privy to workings of the overall conspiracy and consequently have nothing to sell to the prosecutor.
Id. Cases such as this dispel the myth that the sentencing guidelines will “avoid unwarranted sentence disparities,” see 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6), in drug cases. Disparity is built into the system.