Jury Instructions

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Rex Hammond

Case No.: 19-2357

Officials: SYKES, Chief Judge, and KANNE and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Jury Instructions

Over the course of a three-week crime spree in October 2017, Rex Hammond robbed, or attempted to rob, seven stores at gunpoint in Indiana and Michigan. Five of the seven incidents took place in northern Indiana, where the government charged Hammond with five counts of Hobbs Act robbery and several attendant weapons charges. The charges included one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) and two counts of brandishing a weapon during a crime of violence in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). A jury convicted Hammond of all charges, and the district court sentenced him to forty-seven years in prison.

Hammond now appeals his conviction and sentence. First, he argues that the district court should have suppressed certain cell site location information that law enforcement collected to locate him during his robbery spree and to confirm his location on the days of the robberies, based on Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018). He also argues that the district court erred in instructing the jury regarding the felon-in-possession charge under Rehaif v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 2191 (2019). Finally, he claims that Hobbs Act robbery is not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) or under the Sentencing Guidelines, so his § 924(c) conviction must be overturned, and his sentence vacated. We reject each of these arguments and affirm Hammond’s conviction and sentence in all respects.

Affirmed

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