{"id":2022,"date":"2008-11-16T18:23:57","date_gmt":"2008-11-16T23:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=2022"},"modified":"2008-12-20T10:09:27","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T15:09:27","slug":"seventh-circuit-week-in-review-part-ii-determining-drug-quantity-for-sentencing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2008\/11\/seventh-circuit-week-in-review-part-ii-determining-drug-quantity-for-sentencing\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventh Circuit Week in Review, Part II: Determining Drug Quantity for Sentencing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This post wraps up the review of new Seventh Circuit criminal opinions that I began yesterday<\/a>.\u00a0 In United States v. Fox<\/em> <\/a>(Nos. 07-3830 & 07-3831), defendants Fox and Sykes were convicted of various drug trafficking offenses.\u00a0 Fox was in the habit of getting high with Sykes at Sykes’s house.\u00a0 In order to support his habit, Sykes sold drugs to others, and, on an uncertain number of occasions, had Fox make drug deliveries to customers on his behalf.\u00a0\u00a0Fox and Sykes\u00a0were arrested after they participated in a drug sale to an undercover cop, and forty grams of crack cocaine were found by\u00a0police in Sykes’s house.\u00a0 The main issue on appeal was whether Fox should be\u00a0held responsible for those forty grams at sentencing.<\/p>\n

Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the quantity of drugs\u00a0possessed or distributed\u00a0by a defendant\u00a0normally dominates the sentencing calculus.\u00a0 Moreover, a defendant is responsible not just for the drugs that he himself possessed or distributed, but also for the drugs foreseeably possessed or distributed by coconspirators in connection with “jointly undertaken criminal activity.”\u00a0 This is a controversial — and, in my view, misguided — feature of the Guidelines that can result in very long sentences for small players in large drug trafficking operations.\u00a0 (My Criminal Law students will recognize parallels between this feature of the Guidelines and the so-called “Pinkerton<\/em> Rule,” which results in criminal liability for crimes foreseeably committed by one’s coconspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy.)<\/p>\n

In Fox,<\/em> the district court judge determined that Sykes’s possession of forty grams of crack was foreseeable to Fox, and accordingly sentenced Fox as if he had been found in possession of that sizeable quantity of the drug himself.\u00a0 Fox’s sentence was essentially doubled as a result of this decision.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On appeal, the government relied on Fox’s guilty plea to conspiring to distribute crack with Sykes to establish Fox’s responsibility for the forty grams.\u00a0\u00a0However, the Seventh Circuit (per Judge Cudahy) correctly observed that the Guidelines’\u00a0concept of “jointly undertaken criminal activity” is expressly made narrower than Pinkerton<\/em> liability.\u00a0 Thus, a guilty plea to conspiracy cannot suffice to make one defendant\u00a0responsible for sentencing purposes<\/em> for the drugs possessed by another defendant.\u00a0 Instead, the sentencing judge must make separate findings regarding the scope of the defendant’s jointly undertaken criminal activity.\u00a0 Although the sentencing judge in Fox <\/em>determined that Fox “was aware that Sykes stored drugs at his residence,” this finding could not justify increasing Fox’s sentence on the basis of such drugs “[w]ithour consideration of whether that awareness arose out of Fox’s joint criminal activity with Sykes.”\u00a0 The Seventh Circuit thus remanded for the sentencing judge to reconsider whether Fox really should be held responsible for the forty grams — a rare sentencing win for a defendant in the courts of appeals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post wraps up the review of new Seventh Circuit criminal opinions that I began yesterday.\u00a0 In United States v. Fox (Nos. 07-3830 & 07-3831), defendants Fox and Sykes were convicted of various drug trafficking offenses.\u00a0 Fox was in the habit of getting high with Sykes at Sykes’s house.\u00a0 In order to support his habit, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,28,74,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-criminal-law-process","category-federal-sentencing","category-seventh-circuit","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}