Under 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(A), certain drug offenders face a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment if they have two prior drug felony convictions.  As befits such a draconian statute, special procedural protections have been adopted to ensure that the mandatory minimum does not take defendants by suprise at sentencing.  Thus, 21 U.S.C. § 851(a)(1) requires that “before trial . . . the United States attorney [must] . . . serve[] a copy of [an] information on the [defendant] . . . stating in writing the previous convictions to be relied upon.”  But the statute does not specify under what circumstances, if any, a failure to comply with the rule precludes imposition of the mandatory minimum.

By the statute’s literal terms, there can be no doubt that the prosecutor in United States v. Williams (No. 09-1924) failed to comply.  In the § 851 notice he served on Williams, the prosecutor identified only one prior conviction (not the requisite two) and then merely stated, “Further information concerning the defendant’s criminal history can be obtained from the United States Probation Office and specifically the Pretrial Services Report in this matter . . . .”  The Pretrial Services Report, which listed a second drug conviction, was not actually served on the defendant until after trial.  Indeed, it appears that the prosecutor himself had not even received and read the Report before his attempt to incorporate it by reference into the § 851 notice.  This was very sloppy work, and the Seventh Circuit righly chastised both the individual prosecutor and his office (the Northern District of Indiana), which lacked any protocol on how to make § 851 notices.  But sloppiness, even inexcusable sloppiness, is not the same thing as reversible error, and the court (per Judge Posner) affirmed Williams’ life sentence. 

Relying on prior cases, the court characterized the legal standard this way: “[A]s long as the defendant has actual notice of the intended use of a prior conviction to enhance his sentence, the statute has been substantially complied with and that is good enough.”  And Williams could not prevail on this “substantial compliance” test:

[T]he notice says that the government would rely on all “applicable” convictions in the pretrial services report, and it was apparent that the second felony drug conviction was “applicable,” that is, a basis for enhancement.  It was the only other felony drug conviction in the list of 19 dispositions [contained in the report]; . . . a lawyer reading the list would notice that in about fifteen seconds; and if the defendant’s lawyer had had any doubt about which conviction the prosecutor was planning to rely on for an enhancement he could have sought clarification from the prosecutor, and he didn’t — doubtless because it was clear.

Although Williams lost on his § 851 claim, the court made clear that it was not adopting a rule that any attempt at notice would always be sufficient:

We can imagine a notice and a list of convictions that were so confusing that the defendant and his lawyer could not be expected to pick out the one or ones that the government might try to use to enhance the defendant’s sentence. . . .

The government takes a risk by sloppy compliance . . . : the risk that either the court will hold that the government failed to provide the defendant with adequate notice or that the defendant will have a claim that by failing to interpret a confusing notice correctly his lawyer rendered ineffective assistance of counsel.

Interestingly, the Eleventh Circuit seems to be taking a very different view of § 851 compliance.  For instance, United States v. Bowden, No. 08-11935, 2009 WL 32755 (11th Cir. Jan. 7, 2009), apparently employs a strict compliance standard and holds that a failure to meet the standard deprives the sentencing court of jurisdiction to impose the mandatory life sentence.  Williams reports that the Solicitor General recently filed a petition for certiorari in Bowden, so the § 851 issue may be in the news again soon.