{"id":8595,"date":"2010-01-17T19:02:53","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T00:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=8595"},"modified":"2010-01-17T19:14:01","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T00:14:01","slug":"seventh-circuit-earlier-sentence-served-in-juvenile-detention-facility-can-make-defendant-a-career-offender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2010\/01\/seventh-circuit-earlier-sentence-served-in-juvenile-detention-facility-can-make-defendant-a-career-offender\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventh Circuit: Earlier Sentence Served in Juvenile Detention Facility Can Make Defendant a Career Offender"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"seventhAfter pleading guilty in federal court to various\u00a0drug-trafficking offenses, Isaiah Gregory received an eye-popping sentence of 327 months in prison — more than 27 years behind bars.\u00a0 Driving this extraordinary sentence was the district court’s finding that Gregory was a “career offender” under the federal sentencing guidelines.\u00a0 It was the career offender guideline that raised Gregory’s guidelines range from either 120-135 months (as he calculated it) or\u00a0121-151 months (as the government calculated it) to 262-327 months.\u00a0 \u00a0Thus, the career-offender finding likely added more than\u00a0fourteen years to Gregory’s sentence.<\/p>\n

Although the term “career offender” may conjure up images of\u00a0a hardened criminal with a rap sheet down to your knees, the guidelines require only two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense in order to trigger the career-offender sentence enhancement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even at that, Gregory hardly seems the sort of defendant that the Sentencing Commission must have had in mind when it drafted the career-offender guideline.\u00a0 In particular, one of his two qualifying convictions was a $30 robbery he committed when he\u00a0was only\u00a0fifteen (he is now in his mid-20’s) — a robbery for which he was\u00a0sent, not to\u00a0prison, but to a juvenile detention facility.\u00a0 Although it is not clear that the conviction should have counted\u00a0under the plain terms of the career-offender guideline, the Seventh Circuit nonetheless affirmed his sentence last week in United States v. Gregory<\/em> <\/a>(No. 09-2735).\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The relevant guidelines provision (the commentary to \u00a7 4A1.2) indicates that an\u00a0offense committed prior to age eighteen counts against a defendant if it “resulted in [an] adult sentence[] of imprisonment exceeding one year and one month.”\u00a0 Gregory’s robbery conviction was obtained in adult court, but he actually served\u00a0the resulting\u00a0sentence in a juvenile detention facility, not an adult prison.\u00a0 The question, then, is whether he had an “adult sentence.”\u00a0 He was sentenced in adult court, but he did not serve his time in an adult facility.\u00a0 It seems that the language could plausibly be interpreted either way.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this question has produced a circuit split, with the Fourth Circuit favoring Gregory’s interpretation of “adult sentence” and the Third, Ninth, and Eleventh favoring the government’s interpretation.<\/p>\n

In Gregory<\/em>, the Seventh Circuit joined the majority position, reasoning as follows:<\/p>\n

People serve their sentences in many different places: some are moved to private prisons; some wind up spending time in the facilities of another state or the federal government; some are lodged in county jails.\u00a0 The location is unimportant.\u00a0 What does matter is the nature of the underlying conviction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This approach is certainly a reasonable one, but I wonder why no mention was made of the Rule of Lenity, which seems to me an appropriate way of resolving the ambiguity in the guidelines.\u00a0 (For\u00a0a couple of recent posts on the Rule of Lenity in the Supreme Court, see\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I also wonder why a fifteen-year old was prosecuted in adult court and sentenced to six years of confinement (as Gregory was) for a $30 robbery.\u00a0 The case may illustrate an important problem with the use of juvenile offenses in order to enhance later federal sentences: the\u00a0same juvenile offenses can be handled dramatically\u00a0differently depending on\u00a0differences in state law and highly discretionary decisions made by prosecutors and judges.\u00a0 Giving as much weight to juvenile offenses as\u00a0the guidelines called for\u00a0in Gregory <\/em>guarantees dramatic disparities between similarly situated offenders — precisely what the guidelines were intended to prevent.<\/p>\n

Finally, I wonder why the distict court judge sentenced Gregory\u00a0at\u00a0the very top of\u00a0a very severe\u00a0guidelines range — especially when Gregory at most only just barely qualified for a career-offender range.\u00a0 If anything, this would seem an appropriate scenario\u00a0for a district judge to exercise his post-Booker <\/em>discretion to impose a below-range sentence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After pleading guilty in federal court to various\u00a0drug-trafficking offenses, Isaiah Gregory received an eye-popping sentence of 327 months in prison — more than 27 years behind bars.\u00a0 Driving this extraordinary sentence was the district court’s finding that Gregory was a “career offender” under the federal sentencing guidelines.\u00a0 It was the career offender guideline that raised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[85,30,28,74,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circuit-splits","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\/8595","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=8595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}