Plea Agreement – Breach

Listen to this article

7^TH Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Salvador Guadalupe Navarro

Case No.: 12-2606

Officials: BAUER and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges, and ELLIS, District Judge. *

Focus: Plea Agreement – Breach

Government argument for upward departure from agreed upon sentence range recommendation range was in breach of plea agreement.

“Of course, requests for departures and sentencing recommendations are not binding on courts, and courts are free to impose sentences longer than those the government requests. But it appears that in this case the court was influenced by the parties’ recommendations, as the sentence imposed was just above the midpoint between what the government and Navarro requested. The government’s breach of the plea agreement focused the district court’s attention on application note 2, with the weight of the government’s recommendation behind it. This recommendation had extra force because it included a specific number that was far above the applicable guidelines range. As we suggested in United States v. Diaz-Jimenez, 622 F.3d 692, 696 (7th Cir. 2010), a case determining whether an objected-to breach merited reversal of a sentence, the effects of a breach are particularly hard to eliminate when the prosecutor demonstrates a “strong commitment to a sentence” and does nothing to retract the recommendation that breaches the plea agreement. And while, of course, the judge would have been free on his own to refer to application note 2, this remains an adversarial system in which parties and their counsel play essential roles in framing the choices for the judge. The improper upper guidelines number offered by the government may well have anchored the district judge to an inflated sentencing range. We conclude that, had the government’s initial recommendation started at a lower point, Navarro likely would have received a lower sentence. See United States v. Ingram, 721 F.3d 35, 40 (2d Cir. 2013) (Calabresi, J., concurring) (discussing how “anchoring effects” influence judgments and noting that the court “cannot be confident that judges who begin” at a higher guidelines range “would end up reaching the same ‘appropriate’ sentence they would have reached” if they started from a lower guidelines range); see also Hon. Mark W. Bennett, Confronting Cognitive “Anchoring Effect” and “Blind Spot” Biases in Federal Sentencing: A Modest Solution for Reforming a Fundamental Flaw, 104 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 489, 492 (2014) (discussing the “potential robust and powerful anchoring effect” of the sentencing guidelines and “the effect of the ‘bias blind spot’ in determining just sentences”); Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 185 Science 1124, 1124 (1974) (classic theoretical work on how framing and expectations influence judgment).

Reversed and Remanded

Full Text

Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.