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Sentencing — discretion

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 6, 2012//

Sentencing — discretion

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 6, 2012//

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Sentencing — discretion

It was not an abuse of discretion for the sentencing court to impose the same effective sentence on remand, where the defendant’s allocution denied any responsibility.

“We upheld both that conviction and the identical sentence in the first round. Nothing has happened to justify revisiting either ruling. The only challenge the defendant made in his first appeal to the sentence as distinct from the conviction was to an enhancement for ‘distribution [of child pornography] for pecuniary gain,’ U.S.S.G. § 2G2.2(b)(3)(A), and we rejected the challenge. All that has changed since is the statement that the defendant made before being sentenced (his ‘allocution,’ as it is called); it was less remorseful on the second round than on the first, and that is putting it mildly—the second statement was bumptious, defiant, and devoid of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. It would have justified a longer sentence on the child-pornography counts had that been possible. (It was not, because, as we said, he received the maximum sentence.) And the judge could easily have given him a longer total sentence by giving him a longer consecutive sentence for bankruptcy fraud; he gave him 24 months on remand—the statutory maximum is 60. The only changed circumstance—the defiant allocution—undermines rather than supports the defendant’s challenge to the sentence reimposed on remand.”

Affirmed.

11-2776 U.S. v. Peel

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, Stiehl, J., Posner, J.

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