Sentencing

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Charles Robinson, IV

Case No.: 15-2091

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

Focus: Sentencing

Judge improperly makes sentences consecutive when amending sentence of appellant to fit with new guidelines.

“What Amendment 782 would not have allowed the judge to do would have been to reconsider any feature of the original sentence that he had imposed other than its length, such as whether the defendant qualified as a career offender. United States v. Wren, 706 F.3d 861 (7th Cir. 2013). But the change in the applicable guideline provision empowered the judge to invoke U.S.S.G. § 5G1.2(c) and make the three sentences concurrent rather than consecutive. Unfortunately, but not irrevocably, the defendant’s lawyer had misinformed the judge that the three sentences had to run consecutively. In fact they could be made concurrent; and if so, since the longest sentence was 30 years, that would be the defendant’s total sentence.”

Reversed and Remanded

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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.