Court Opinion

ID: 9575858
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:18:02.804765+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:48:07.572700
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I concur in the court’s opinion except for the part of it that affirms Mr. Osborne’s sentence, and from that I respectfully dissent. The government admits that Mr. Osborne did not join the conspiracy for which he was convicted until very late in its existence, yet the court approves sentencing Mr. Osborne based on acts that the conspiracy committed before he joined it. This is contrary to both reason and authority. Of course, the scope and object of the charged conspiracy can be proved by acts that it committed before Mr. Osborne joined it, see, e.g., United States v. Carrascal-Olivera, 755 F.2d 1446, 1452 n. 8 (11th Cir.1985); and there were cases under a previous guideline regime holding that such acts could be charged against a defendant as relevant conduct in determining a sentence, if the defendant knew of them or if constructive knowledge of them could reasonably be imputed to him. But, as the court notes, the guidelines now specifically repudiate this approach to sentencing.
There is no principled reason to ignore the command of the guidelines and apply *955sentencing rules to conspiracies to violate 21 U.S.C. § 841 that are different from the rules that apply to other conspiracies. The guidelines apply to all conspiracies uniformly and there is nothing in the case law in the other circuits that indicates that drug conspiracies are entitled to some kind of carve-out from the generally applicable rules. See, e.g., United States v. Irvin, 2 F.3d 72 (4th Cir.1993) cert. denied, 510 U.S. 1125, 114 S.Ct. 1086, 127 L.Ed.2d 401 (1994); United States v. Becerra, 992 F.2d 960 (9th Cir.1993); United States v. Madkins, 14 F.3d 277 (5th Cir.1994). Nor does United States v. Smith, 240 F.3d 732 (8th Cir.2001), stand in the way of my conclusion. The issue that the present case raises was not involved in Smith, and the general language in the case does not require us to ignore the guidelines provision directing us not to use criminal activity that a conspiracy engaged in before a defendant joined it in fixing a defendant’s sentence. In fact, Smith specifically says that the guideline rules apply to drug conspiracies: It could hardly have said otherwise, since the guidelines create no substantive crimes and apply to all crimes, absent, of course, some specific statutory direction, which is missing here.
I would therefore remand Mr. Osborne’s case to the district court for resentencing under the correct legal principles.