Court Opinion

ID: 9478851
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:00:35.005134+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:39.634535
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
with whom CUDAHY and MANION, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting with respect to the aiding and abetting conviction but otherwise concurring.
We held in United States v. Ambrose, 740 F.2d 505 (7th Cir.1984), that a person who aids and abets a criminal “kingpin” may be punished under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise (“CCE”) statute, 21 U.S.C. § 848. The argument for this conclusion is simple. “Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.” 18 U.S.C. § 2(a). The CCE statute establishes “an offense against the United States”, and Pino-Perez aided and abetted the commission of that offense. He is therefore “punishable as a principal.” Aides do not satisfy the five-supervised-persons requirement of the CCE statute, *1238but § 2(a) may apply even when the assistant could not have committed the principal offense. E.g., Standefer v. United States, 447 U.S. 10, 100 S.Ct. 1999, 64 L.Ed.2d 689 (1980) (a private person may be convicted under § 2(a) for abetting a violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7214(a)(2), which makes it a crime for an officer of the United States to take a bribe in the course of executing the revenue laws).
The task of interpretation is not quite so straightforward, though, for several reasons.
• Section 848 imposes a minimum term of ten years’ imprisonment and a maximum of life, all without possibility of parole. The term was set so high because the statute condemns only managers who supervise at least five others for extended periods. Liability for aiding and abetting sweeps up persons who supervise no one. This led us to hold in Ambrose that the judge need not adhere to the minimum-sentence provisions of § 848 when sentencing aiders and abettors. 740 F.2d at 508-10. The court abandons that limitation today as unsupportable, with the result that the aider and abettor faces the kingpin’s minimum term although his role may be far less significant than the kingpin’s.
• Suppliers, such as Pino-Perez, are among the enterprise’s aiders and abettors. Section 841 addresses suppliers in detail. If the defendant sells five or more kilograms of cocaine, then the penalties under §§ 841 and 846 are the same as those under the CCE statute, see 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(l)(A)(ii). If the defendant sells between 0.5 and 5.0 kilograms, the penalties are lower, § 841(b)(l)(B)(ii). Smaller amounts yield still smaller sanctions, § 841(b)(1)(C). See United States v. Martinez-Zayas, 857 F.2d 122, 127-32 (3d Cir.1988). To treat an aider and abettor as a kingpin on the authority of § 2(a) is to demolish the graduated structure of penalties under § 841.
• Employees of an organization aid and abet their boss. The CCE statute authorizes higher punishment for higher-ups. Only a person who supervises five or more others is a kingpin. It would be absurd to treat lords and vassals identically under the CCE law on the ground that vassals lend aid and assistance; the structure of the CCE statute is set against it. Ambrose therefore added an element, which the court today reaffirms: “the persons supervised by the kingpin cannot be punished as aiders and abettors”, Maj. op. at 1231.
• The addition of this extra-statutory element has the potential to create a crazy-quilt pattern of liability. Assistants outside the organization may be called aiders and abettors, receiving higher punishment than more important operatives within the organization. Assistants with roles in two or more organizations may be both covered and excluded. Pino-Perez undoubtedly is such a person. (No one supposes that he tended and harvested the plants, refined the cocaine, smuggled and transported the drug himself.)
• The extra element could put the defendant in a pickle if he really is a subordinate of the kingpin, but the prosecutor omits him from the list of those the kingpin is charged with supervising. The only defense to the charge of aiding and abetting the CCE offense might be to paint oneself as a henchman of the person charged as the kingpin, which greatly enhances the possibility of conviction on other charges. Anyway, why should liability depend on whether the prosecutor claims that the aider and abettor is not in the chain of command of the criminal organization? Are all but five of the criminal enterprise’s couriers to be convicted as aiders and abettors and sentenced under the CCE statute?
These difficulties show that statutory texts cannot dispose of the case. To follow the *1239language of 18 U.S.C. § 2(a) is to require at least one addition to the equally plain language of 21 U.S.C. § 848 and to do substantial damage to the exquisitely clear language of 21 U.S.C. § 841 establishing a scale of punishment graduated by amounts sold.
If § 2(a) traditionally were read woodenly, that would be that, for the CCE statute must be understood against the interpretation § 2(a) had when Congress acted. But § 2(a) has never been applied mechanically; its scope depends on the structure and functions of the substantive statute. See United States v. Farrar, 281 U.S. 624, 50 S.Ct. 425, 74 L.Ed. 1078 (1930), implying that purchasers of liquor from a bootlegger are not liable as aiders and abettors because Congress meant to limit liability to sellers, and Gebardi v. United States, 287 U.S. 112, 53 S.Ct. 35, 77 L.Ed. 206 (1932), holding that prostitutes may not be convicted as aiders and abettors of the Mann Act offense, because that law requires the prosecutor to show that the defendant transported prostitutes across state lines, implicitly establishing a difference in culpability between the organizer and the prostitute. When the structure of the main offense speaks to the scope of accessorial liability, Gebardi tells us, § 2(a) ought not be taken literally. Indeed, the court today refuses to take § 2(a) literally, for it says that the kingpin’s subordinates may not be convicted as aiders and abettors. To curb the worst effects of punishing casual hangers-on and minor assistants under the draconian terms of § 848, the court adds that a person may be convicted under § 2(a) only if he “want[s] the kingpin’s enterprise to succeed”, maj. op. at 1235 — a novel mental element that can’t be located in the text or history of either § 2(a) or § 848. So the only question is the extent to which we must depart from literal implementation to make the statutes work together. On this question, the legislative history is suggestive.
The legislative proposals that led to § 848 did not start with suggestions for a new criminal law. Congress was dissatisfied with the penalties being imposed on higher-ups in drug-peddling organizations. This led to proposals to enhance the sentences of those so convicted. The first versions of what became § 848 were sentence-enhancement provisions. If the defendant were convicted of a drug offense, the prosecutor would be allowed to argue to the sentencing judge that the defendant was a kingpin (a perpetrator of a “pattern of conduct”), authorizing extra punishment. United States v. Amen, 831 F.2d 373, 381-82 (2d Cir.1987), reports what happened next:
The Association of the Bar of the City of New York and others objected that these provisions allowed sentencing to be imposed without providing a defendant with an opportunity to cross-examine persons providing information as to the continuing criminal offense. [H.R.Rep. 91-1444, 91st Cong., 2d Sess., 1970 U.S. Code Cong. & Admin.News] at 4650-51. An amendment offered by Representative John D. Dingel and adopted by the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee corrected the defects in the original sentencing bill. “Instead of providing a post-conviction-presentencing procedure, it made engagement in a continuing criminal enterprise a new and distinct offense with all its elements triable in court.” Id. at 4651_
While the legislative history makes no mention of aiders and abettors, it makes it clear that the purpose of making CCE a new offense rather than leaving it as sentence enhancement was not to catch in the CCE net those who aided and abetted the supervisors’ activities, but to correct its possible constitutional defects by making the elements of the CCE triable before a jury.
Amen presents the history of the bill in the House. The Conference Committee-accepted the House version of the" CCE provision with only technical changes, so that the history in the House turns out to be the only important history. See H.R.Conf.Rep. No. 91-1603, 91st Cong., 2d Sess., 1970 U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News at 4657. On the other side one might point to a comment in the Senate Report that to be culpable under the CCE statute the “defen*1240dant must have occupied a position of organizer or assumed a management role such as a hit man”, S.Rep. 91-613, 91st Cong., 1st Sess. 28 (1969), which suggests that important operatives of the venture may be convicted. But the Senate Report does not tie this comment to the language of the statute, which requires supervision, and as we have emphasized the transformation in the House is what matters, given that the Conference Committee adopted the House’s language.
Section 848 became a substantive statute only in order to afford defendants greater procedural rights than a sentence-enhancement statute would have done. Nothing in the debates leading to this conversion suggests that any Member of Congress wanted to enlarge the liability of hired hands, suppliers, or other aiders and abettors, or contemplated that § 848 would produce this result.
Legislative contemplation is of course not a condition to the application of § 2(a), which comes into play whenever Congress defines a substantive crime. “It is not the law that a statute can have no effects which are not explicitly mentioned in its legislative history”. Pittston Coal Group v. Sebben, — U.S. -, 109 S.Ct. 414, 420-21, 102 L.Ed.2d 408 (1988). So if we were prepared to hold that § 2(a) applies to § 848 in the way it applies to any other crime, then we might dismiss the evolution of § 848 as irrelevant. Yet it is common ground among members of the court that the structure and function of § 848 matter —that is why the majority holds that the kingpin’s subordinates cannot be aiders and abettors, why it emphasizes that only those who “want the kingpin’s enterprise to succeed”, maj. op. at 1235, may be convicted under § 2(a). The majority’s slippery slope argument — that once we start looking at the structure and history of the CCE statute, certainty is lost — does not carry the day when the majority does what it decries: it uses the structure of § 848, and the purposes ascribed to Congress, to cut back on the scope of § 2(a). Once we enter the business of reading the structure and functions of § 848, how § 848 came to its current form and how aiding-and-abetting liability undercuts the limitations of § 841 become important. The debates show Congress in a savage mood, no doubt, but its wrath had a specific object. See also Garrett v. United States, 471 U.S. 773, 781, 105 S.Ct. 2407, 2413, 85 L.Ed.2d 764 (1985) (the CCE statute is “a carefully crafted prohibition aimed at a special problem. [It] is designed to reach the ‘top brass’ in the drug rings, not the lieutenants and foot soldiers”). The concern of the legislature lay in its desire to create mandatory minimum (and life maximum) penalties for the doyens of drugs, not in achieving increases in the sentences of aides-de-camp.
My colleagues imply that they have not really cut back on the scope of § 2(a) by preventing its application to a kingpin’s subordinates. They treat Gebardi as holding that when an accomplice’s action is part of the definition of the offense, he is not an aider and abettor, see United States v. Southard, 700 F.2d 1, 20 (1st Cir.1983), and say that they have enforced the full scope of § 2(a) as so read, maj. op. at 1231. That interpretation cannot account for Standefer, which holds that the payor of a bribe may be convicted of aiding and abetting the receipt of that bribe, although the payor’s role is an essential element of the recipient’s crime. As for the Mann Act: interstate transportation of prostitutes is unlawful, and Gebardi, treating prostitutes as victims, holds that they may not be convicted of aiding or abetting their own transportation. The kingpin’s subordinates are not victims; § 848 was not enacted for their protection. The court excludes the subordinates not because Gebardi compels this but because it believes that otherwise “the purpose of the kingpin statute — to punish the kingpin more severely than other drug offenders — would be thwarted”, maj. op. at 1232 (emphasis added). Decisions based on structure and purpose ought to be based on the whole structure and all of the purposes.
Forced to choose between damage to the language of § 2(a) (by having no aiding and abetting liability) and damage to the language and structure of both § 848 (by adding new elements for aiders and abettors) and § 841 (by eliminating the gradation of *1241penalty by the amount of drugs supplied), we should preserve as much as possible of §§ 841 and 848. Suppliers come within 21 U.S.C. §§ 841 and 846, which read directly on their conduct and are no more lenient for big sellers than § 848 is for big cheeses. Pino-Perez, a wholesaler, was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment without parole under § 846 and § 841, concurrent with the CCE sentence except for a $50 special assessment. When the supplier runs a delivery organization of his own, then he too faces prosecution under the CCE statute. See United States v. Bond, 847 F.2d 1233 (7th Cir.1988) (CCE conviction, as a principal, of one situated similarly to Pino-Perez). A prosecutor need not choose whichever statute is most favorable to the accused. United States v. Batchelder, 442 U.S. 114, 99 S.Ct. 2198, 60 L.Ed.2d 755 (1979). But the prosecutor must find a statute that is applicable, and the interplay among provisions helps us to know a statute’s domain. The CCE statute covers suppliers only if they have organizations over which to reign. A prosecutor who wants a mandatory minimum sentence or a life maximum should not be allowed to evade the need to prove the defendant’s supervisory role under § 848 or the quantity of drugs involved under § 841.