Sentencing

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States v. Orlando Rosales

Case No: 15-1580

Officials: POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing

Court did not commit procedural error in sentencing, properly sentences appellant as career offender.

“Second, the record otherwise makes plain to us why the district judge was not convinced the career offender guideline was out of place here. See Rita, 551 U.S. at 358-59, 127 S. Ct. at 2469 (short explanation of court’s sentencing rationale sufficient where record makes plain reason for its conclusion); Jones, 798 F.3d at 618 (“So long as the record gives us confidence that the court meaningfully considered the defendant’s mitigation arguments, ‘even if implicitly and imprecisely,’ that is enough.”) (quoting United States v. Diekemper, 604 F.3d 345, 355 (7th Cir. 2010)). Rosales had not the requisite two but rather three prior convictions for drug trafficking, and the case for those predicates being minor (or, for that matter, remote from his present conviction, as he has also argued) was never as convincing as his counsel made it out to be. One of those three convictions involved a 7.3-pound quantity of marijuana, which is by no means a small quantity, let alone a personal-use quantity, as Rosales has said was typical of his prior convictions. More to the point, Rosales’s criminal history reflects a pattern of drug sales that began with marijuana, transitioned to cocaine (a more serious narcotic), and culminated in a multiparticipant trafficking operation that dealt in what the district judge characterized as substantial quantities of the latter drug. (She found that Rosales was responsible for 2.87 kilograms of cocaine, conservatively.) Apart from the predicate convictions triggering the career offender enhancement, Rosales’s criminal history included multiple arrests and convictions for the possession of narcotics and drug paraphernalia. Furthermore, as the district judge pointed out, his history revealed no evidence of legitimate income in the years immediately preceding the instant offense. So one could reasonably infer, No. 15-1580 11 and it is obvious to us that Judge Crabb did, that and it is obvious to us that Judge Crabb did, that Rosales was engaged in drug dealing in those years and that the transactions that gave rise to this prosecution were part of a years long, continuous, and escalating pattern of drug dealing. In short, it does not appear that Rosales was unfairly ensnared by the career offender guideline.

Affirmed

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