Justia Criminal Law Opinion Summaries

Defendant was arrested for a firearm offense after he was pulled over and during the traffic stop, the officer conducted a pat down search, finding a firearm. Defendant entered a conditional guilty plea, subject to his right to appeal the denial of his motion to suppress.On appeal, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of defendant's motion to suppress. The court explained that the officer had reasonable suspicion to make the traffic stop. Here, there was a color discrepancy between the vehicle's actual color and the color listed on the vehicle registration. The officer also testified that, in his recent experience, several vehicles with mismatched colors came back as stolen. Thus, this gave the officer reasonable suspicion that the vehicle View "United States v. Joshua Brown" on Justia Law

Defendant entered a guilty plea to two counts of distributing a controlled substance. The district court concluded that defendant qualified as a career offender under U.S.S.G Sec. 4B1.1. Defendant appealed on this issue.The Eighth Circuit affirmed. A defendant qualifies for the enhancement if his present offense and at least two past offenses are felony convictions for a “crime of violence or a controlled substance offense.” Here, the PSR identified three predicate offenses qualifying defendant for the enhancement: a 1994 attempted murder, a 1994 aggravated vehicular hijacking, and a 2018 possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver.Defendant claimed that his attempted murder and vehicular hijacking offenses do not qualify as predicate offenses because 1.) neither resulted in him serving prison time within the past 15 years and 2.) neither is a crime of violence. The court rejected both arguments, affirming defendant's sentence. View "United States v. Eric Coleman" on Justia Law

A jury convicted Defendant of conspiring to distribute 50 grams or more of methamphetamine. On appeal, Defendant contends (1) the evidence was insufficient to support the conviction; (2) the district court erred in admitting evidence of Defendant’s prior bad acts; (3) the district court failed to credit Defendant for acceptance of responsibility; and (4) the sentence was substantively unreasonable.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court held that a reasonable jury could have relied on the evidence to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendant was a knowing participant in the conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. Therefore, the evidence presented at trial was sufficient to sustain Defendant’s conviction. Further, the court reasoned that because the testimony was relevant to a material issue in the trial and had a non-propensity purpose, the district court did not abuse its discretion by admitting it. Additionally, Defendant cannot simultaneously argue that she accepted responsibility but also had no knowledge or involvement in the conspiracy. Thus, the district court did not err in denying a reduction for acceptance of responsibility. Further, the court explained that because Defendant’s sentence was below her Guidelines range and justified by “precisely the kind of defendant-specific determinations that are within the special competence of sentencing courts,” the court cannot say the district court abused its discretion. View "United States v. Juana Aguilar" on Justia Law

A jury found Defendants guilty of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. In a consolidated appeal, the three raise numerous challenges to the admission of wiretap evidence, the jury instructions, the sufficiency of the evidence, and their sentences.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. In regards to Defendant’s argument that the district court erred in admitting the wiretap evidence, the court found that the district court did not clearly err in determining that the Government satisfied the necessity requirement. The court reasoned that the affidavits explained in great detail how these conventional methods had failed—and would have likely continued to fail—to reveal the full extent of the organization’s drug-trafficking activities and membership because, among other reasons, Defendant and his associates utilized various and frequently changing residences and vehicles. Further, the orders authorizing the wiretaps expressly required minimization, providing that interception “must immediately terminate when it is determined that the conversation is unrelated to communications subject to interception.”   Moreover, the court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in declining to give the multiple-conspiracies jury instruction. Here, the Government’s evidence at trial overwhelmingly pointed to a single conspiracy with a singular purpose—selling methamphetamine and cocaine—a steady core membership—Defendants, and others—operating primarily in the same territory—Burlington—over several years. Witnesses consistently described a single organization in which Defendant would recruit and oversee multiple underlings. Although one of the defendants may have joined the conspiracy later than other members, and membership in the organization may have fluctuated somewhat over the years, this is not necessarily evidence of separate conspiracies. View "United States v. Breon Armstrong" on Justia Law

A jury convicted Defendant of being a felon in possession of a firearm and possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime. The district court denied his motion for a new trial in a thirty-page Order and sentenced Defendant as an armed career criminal to 360 months imprisonment. The court also revoked Defendant’s supervised release and imposed a consecutive fifty-four-month sentence. Defendant appealed his conviction and sentence, arguing there was insufficient evidence to convict him of the firearm offenses; the district court committed evidentiary errors and improperly instructed the jury; the government committed Brady violations; his trial counsel was ineffective; and the district court erred in sentencing him as an armed career criminal and abused its discretion in revoking supervised release.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed the conviction but, based on an intervening armed-career-criminal decision, remanded for resentencing.  The court explained that at oral argument, without conceding the merits of these issues, government counsel conceded that United States v. Perez, 46 F.4th 691 (8th Cir. 2022), would require a different outcome and, therefore, the court should remand for further proceedings on whether Defendant was properly sentenced under the ACCA. The court agreed that is the proper course of action. As the district court may decide that the Iowa convictions are no longer proper ACCA predicate offenses, an issue the court did not decide, that would moot the question of whether the Georgia conviction is a qualifying ACCA predicate, absent a second appeal. View "United States v. Kenny Smart" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon in violation of 18 U.S.C Section 922(g)(1) pursuant to a written plea agreement. He later moved to withdraw his guilty plea when the probation office determined that he had three or more prior convictions “for a violent felony or a serious drug offense,” which qualified him for a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years imprisonment under the Armed Career Criminal Act (“ACCA”). At sentencing, the district court denied Defendant’s motion, reasoning that the plea agreement expressly stated that Defendant may be subject to a mandatory minimum sentence under the ACCA and that this would not be grounds for withdrawal of his plea. The district court then concluded that Defendant’s prior convictions indeed qualified him for a 15-year sentence under the ACCA and sentenced him accordingly. Defendant argued that the district court erred by not allowing him to withdraw his guilty plea and by finding that his criminal history included three ACCA predicate offenses.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court consulted the indictment to which Defendant pleaded guilty. The court explained that the language makes clear that Defendant pleaded guilty to the Section 571.030.1(9) offense of shooting at other persons from a motor vehicle. The final step, then, is to determine whether this offense has a physical-force element. The court concluded that it does because there is no “non-fanciful, non-theoretical manner” to knowingly shoot at other persons from a motor vehicle “without so much as the threatened use of physical force.” View "United States v. Clarence Harris" on Justia Law

A jury convicted Defendant of aggravated sexual abuse, and the district court sentenced him to 440 months in prison. Defendant appealed his conviction. The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that Defendant claims the district court erred “by failing to instruct the jury that it had to agree on the specific act of sexual abuse in order to convict.” However, Defendant cites no authority that failure to give a specific unanimity instruction. To the contrary, the Eighth Circuit has held that jurors need not agree on a specific sexual act to reach a unanimous verdict.   Further, Defendant contends the district court erred in admitting hearsay statements regarding the reports of abuse. The court wrote that the statement was limited in scope to the victim’s disclosure of the abuse, not the specifics of it. But even if the statements were inadmissible hearsay, their admission would be harmless given the other evidence against Defendant.   Moreover, Defendant maintains he was deprived of his Fifth Amendment right to a fair trial because the government’s closing argument “distorted its burden of proof and unfairly mischaracterized Defendant’s theory of the case.” Even if the closing were improper, under plain error review, the Eighth Circuit wrote it will “reverse only under exceptional circumstances,” which requires that Defendant show “a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different absent the alleged error.” The evidence and the district court’s instructions show this is not an exceptional case where the conviction is overturned based solely on a prosecutor’s statements during closing argument. View "United States v. Adam Poitra" on Justia Law

Following a six-week trial in 1998, a federal jury convicted Defendant of twelve crimes he committed as part of the 6-0 Tres Crips, including the five murders (Counts 51-55) and conspiracy to distribute cocaine and crack cocaine (Count 2). Under the mandatory sentencing guidelines then in effect, the district court imposed statutory maximum life imprisonment sentences on those counts. Defendant sought Section 2255 relief under Section 404 of the First Step Act of 2018, which made relief under Sections 2 and 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 available to eligible defendants sentenced prior to 2010. Invoking the concurrent sentence doctrine, the district court denied First Step Act relief. On appeal, Defendant argued that the district court abused its discretion by employing the concurrent sentence doctrine to avoid resentencing Defendant.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court wrote that in reviewing the district court’s use of the concurrent sentence doctrine for an abuse of discretion, the district court applied the doctrine consistent with controlling Eighth Circuit decisions. The court explained that when, as here, the district court ruling on a First Step Act motion initially sentenced the defendant and later granted a sentence reduction, the court’s “plain statement” that it declined to exercise its discretion to grant a further reduction “closes the matter.” The district court properly treated the concurrent sentence doctrine as “a species of harmless-error review.” As it applied the proper analysis in invoking the doctrine, and its analysis is consistent with our First Step Act precedents, there was no abuse of its broad First Step Act discretion. View "United States v. Robert Jefferson" on Justia Law

After a jury convicted Defendant, former Sheriff of Franklin County, Arkansas, of depriving two jail detainees of their constitutional rights by subjecting them to unreasonable force that resulted in bodily injury, the district court sentenced Defendant to 48 months imprisonment, followed by 2 years of supervised release. Defendant challenged both his conviction and his sentence.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court held that the district court’s finding that Defendant attempted to influence Ball’s testimony was not clearly erroneous and sufficiently supports the district court’s application of the obstruction-of-justice enhancement. The district court sentenced Defendant to a within-Guidelines sentence of 48 months’ imprisonment. Defendant argued in a cursory fashion that his sentence is “greater than necessary,” given the alleged de minimis nature of his victims’ injuries and the purported bias of the witnesses at trial. However, the district court discussed Section 3553(a) factors in-depth and considered the proffered mitigating and aggravating circumstances in crafting the sentence. View "United States v. Anthony Boen" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to carjacking and brandishing-a-firearm charges and received a 179-month sentence. He now argued that the district court committed procedural and substantive errors in determining his sentence.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. He first argued that the district court procedurally erred by referring to the JSIN statistics. He claimed that he had a right under Rule 32 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to have notice of, and therefore time to review, all material information relied on by the district court at sentencing.  The court explained that it found that any error made by the district court in interpreting the JSIN statistics “did not substantially influence the outcome of the sentencing proceeding” because the district court focused on Defendant, not the data. If the district court erred in this case, its error was harmless.   Further, Defendant’s 179-month, within-guidelines sentence reflects the district court’s careful weighing of the Section 3553(a) factors. As the district court did not fail to consider or properly weigh any relevant factor or otherwise commit a clear error of judgment, the court concluded that Defendant’s sentence is not substantively unreasonable. View "United States v. Ryan McDaniel" on Justia Law