Sentencing Guidelines

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Gary Solomon

Case No.: 17-1747

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and ROVNER and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges

Focus: Sentencing Guidelines

Hard as it may try, Chicago has not yet managed to shake free from the scourge of public corruption. Gary Solomon, Thomas Vranas, and Barbara Byrd-Bennett have added another chapter to this inglorious history. As CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Byrd-Bennett worked behind the scenes to assure that two companies headed by Solomon and Vranas would receive lucrative contracts. In exchange, Solomon and Vranas agreed that they would pay Byrd-Bennett a percentage of the revenue generated by those contracts when she came to work for them at the end of her tenure with CPS. After the fraudulent scheme was exposed, each participant pleaded guilty to committing wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343 and 1346. Solomon was sentenced to 84 months’ imprisonment, 30 months more than Byrd-Bennett received. Solomon’s sentence also significantly exceeds Vranas’s, though that gap is irrelevant for this appeal.

Solomon wants a new sentencing hearing. He accuses the district court of incorporating the value of a contract unrelated to the criminal agreement into his advisory sentencing guidelines calculation. That alleged error resulted in an offense score that was four levels higher than Solomon believes it should have been. Additionally, Solomon believes that the disparity between Byrd-Bennett’s sentence and his sentence is unwarranted, making his sentence substantively unreasonable. Because the record supports the court’s decision to include the contested contract in the offense level calculation, and because dissimilar cooperation is a reasonable basis for a sentencing disparity, we affirm the district court’s sentence.

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.