Plea & Sentencing – Waiver of Counsel

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Kurt Johnson

Case No.: 19-2718

Officials: ROVNER, SCUDDER, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Plea & Sentencing – Waiver of Counsel

Kurt Johnson elected to represent himself at trial on federal fraud charges. In Johnson’s own telling, he fared at trial “like a bug under a hard-stomping prosecution boot heel”—which is to say he lost. Johnson now appeals his waiver of counsel. He says the district court failed to confirm that his decision to waive counsel was knowing and intelligent. We agree that the district court’s colloquy with Johnson was lacking, but we nonetheless uphold Johnson’s waiver of counsel. This was not Johnson’s first rodeo—as he himself told the district court. In fact, Johnson had previously represented himself at a federal fraud trial, lost, and then unsuccessfully appealed that waiver of counsel. Given this history, and Johnson’s separate and more thorough colloquy with the magistrate judge in this case, we cannot conclude that Johnson’s decision to forgo counsel the second time around was uninformed. We also reject Johnson’s challenge to the district court’s sentencing explanation. We thus affirm his conviction and sentence.

Affirmed

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