Sentencing Guidelines

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Lindani Mzembe

Case No.: 20-1265

Officials: KANNE, ROVNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing Guidelines

This appeal presents several related issues about how federal judges should decide whether sentences in federal prosecutions should run consecutively to or concurrently with separate sentences in unrelated state prosecutions. The issues arise in an unusual way in this case because the state court had already decided to impose a long sentence consecutive to the federal offender’s federal sentence. Intervening changes in federal law then required resentencing in federal court, where the consecutive v. concurrent question could be revisited. The defendant-appellant argues that, in refusing to make the new federal sentence concurrent with the intervening state sentence, the district judge erred (a) by giving an inadequate explanation for his decision, (b) by deferring to the state court’s intervening judgment to make the sentences consecutive, and (c) by imposing an unreasonably severe sentence that is a de facto life sentence. We find no reversible error, so we affirm the new federal sentence.

Affirmed

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Derek A Hawkins is Associate Corporate Counsel, IP at Amazon.