Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

01-1353 U.S. v. Atwater

By: dmc-admin//December 3, 2001//

01-1353 U.S. v. Atwater

By: dmc-admin//December 3, 2001//

Listen to this article

“[A]ll the sentencing judge said was that Atwater ‘either knew or should have known that a firearm would be involved in this case. I have never heard of a bank robbery without a firearm. That is sort of a given. And there is testimony from more than one person that a firearm was involved here.’… But that is false. Although the government’s lawyer could not furnish us with any statistics, a call to his employer, the Department of Justice, produced the following FBI statistics for 1999: of the 6,599 robberies that year of banks and related financial institutions, firearms were used in only 1,988, which is 30 percent; and – confirming our own impression that many bank robberies are committed by unarmed persons who hand threatening notes to tellers – 3,590 of the robberies were indeed committed by note. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bank Crime Statistics Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 1999, 1, 4 (2000).”

“A substantial fraction of bank robberies do involve the use of a gun, so unless Atwater had some special reason to think Cagle wasn’t going to use a gun, that use may well have been reasonably foreseeable to Atwater. But that was a judgment to be made by the sentencing judge in the first instance, on the basis of a correct understanding of all the pertinent facts. The 30 percent figure that we derive from FBI statistics abstracts from all the particulars of the individual case. Those particulars might make the probability of the accomplice’s using a gun much higher or much lower. As no evidence was put before the sentencing judge in this case of how frequently guns are used in bank robberies and he greatly exaggerated that frequency and having done so neglected the particulars of the case, his judgment cannot be upheld.”

Vacated and remanded.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Dillin, J., Posner, J.

Polls

Should Steven Avery be granted a new evidentiary hearing?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Legal News

See All Legal News

WLJ People

Sea all WLJ People

Opinion Digests