Court Opinion

ID: 9494737
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:45:08.135406+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:34.982761
License: Public Domain

BOGGS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in
part and dissenting in part.
With one exception, I agree with all of the court’s excellent opinion in this case. I do not agree with the court’s conclusion, at pages 11-14, that we should adopt as a firm rule the Second Circuit’s decision in United States v. Studley. That case requires that a district court, in determining drug quantities for which a defendant is responsible, make a particularized finding that “the acts were within the scope of the defendant’s agreement.” I say this not because there may not be some cases in which an agreement is sufficiently limited that it would be appropriate to limit the quantity for which the defendant is responsible, but because such instances will be relatively rare. We are thus simply laying a trap for unwary judges as well as potentially opening the doors to a huge number of merely redundant remands upon appeals now pending or upon habeas corpus proceedings.
In general, if there is an agreement, even if implicit, to participate in a drug conspiracy, it is done so without limitation. By selling drugs as part of a larger organization, the “agreement” is simply to help and participate in the larger organization, whose scope may be large, but foreseeable. It is possible, of course, that a person could state explicitly “I agree to carry this particular load of marijuana, but right after that I am going back to Chicago Law School and will never deal with you again.” However, such an occurrence would definitely be the exception, not the rule. If the defendant has a plausible case that the agreement was sufficiently limited, it may be that the application of such a rule would make sense in that instance. However, I do not think that a general rule is wise. Carpenter’s argument is particularly weak in that his only differentiation from the total amount distributed by the conspiracy was simply that he was heard on a wiretap on only three of the thirty days of that wiretap. There was no indication that he had otherwise withdrawn, been inactive, or segmented his activities from those of the general conspiracy.