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Sentencing — bank robbery

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//August 21, 2014//

Sentencing — bank robbery

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//August 21, 2014//

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

Criminal

Sentencing — bank robbery

If in the course of committing a bank robbery the robber abducts someone, the minimum punishment is 10 years in prison, but if he kills someone, the minimum is life in prison.

“It’s silly for the government to invoke the statute’s ‘plain Language’ and ‘plain text’ and insist that therefore ‘the sole function of the court[] is to enforce it according to its terms,’ or to say that ‘the “if death results” language may be considered redundant to the phrase, “kills any person”’ (emphasis added). The statute is a mess. Nevertheless it is apparent what the drafters of the statute and the Congress that enacted it and the President who signed it intended, or if asked (for it is uncertain who ever read the provision, buried as it is in a 356-page statute, Pub. L. 103-322, 108 Stat. 1796 (Sept. 13, 1994)), would have said they intended: if in the course of committing a bank robbery the robber abducts someone, the minimum punishment is ten years in prison, but if he kills someone the minimum is life in prison. United States v. Parks, 700 F.3d 775, 778–79 (6th Cir. 2012); cf. United States v. Turner, 389 F.3d 111, 120–21 (4th Cir. 2004). We know this is what was intended because the confusing ‘if death results’ passage was substituted for ‘punished by death if the verdict of the jury shall so direct,’ Pub. L. 103-322, § 60003(a)(9), 108 Stat. 1969 (Sept. 13, 1994), in more than a dozen provisions of the federal criminal code, in order to eliminate the possibility that a jury would impose a death sentence for a bank robbery in which no one died. See H.R. Rep. No. 103- 466, at pp. 12–15 (March 25, 1994). The change had nothing to do with abduction.”

Affirmed.

13-1812 U.S. v. Vance

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Gottschall, J., Posner, J.

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