Sentencing Guidelines

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Byron J. Holton

Case No.: 17-1406

Officials: BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and MANION, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing Guidelines

On appeal, Holton argues that the district judge imposed a substantively unreasonable sentence by relying on uncharged conduct (the drug-dealer robberies) as the basis for imposing an above-Guidelines sentence on the conspiracy count. He first contends that the judge wrongly supplanted the jury’s fact- finding role and improperly used a preponderance-of-the- evidence standard (instead of beyond a reasonable doubt) when determining that he robbed drug dealers. In support of this argument, he quotes Justice Scalia, who, in a dissent from a denial of certiorari, disapproved of judges finding facts at sentencing about uncharged or acquitted conduct.

According to Justice Scalia, “any fact necessary to prevent a sentence from being substantively unreasonable—thereby exposing the defendant to the longer sentence—is an element that must be either admitted by the defendant or found by the jury.” Jones v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 8, 8 (2014) (Scalia, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari). In the alternative, Holton asserts that the district judge wrongly assumed that “if Appellant was convicted on the conspiracy count, it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Appellant was involved with the uncharged conduct … .” The judge merely decided that the earlier robberies were relevant to sentencing Holton for the conspiracy offense and that she was satisfied from the trial evidence that the conduct had occurred.

Affirmed

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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.