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Saturday, August 6th, 2011

PC World

United States v. Vilar, No. 10-521-cr (2d Cir. July 19, 2011) (Jacobs, CJ, Rakoff, DJ)

Defendant Vilar and his co-defendant Tanaka were convicted of fraud-related charges after a jury trial. Both filed timely notices of appeal and the appeals were consolidated. Vilar, represented by new counsel, decided to develop a claim that his trial counsel was ineffective, and make a motion under 18 U.S.C. § 2255. This per curiam resolves his motion to dismiss the appeal without prejudice, with leave to reinstate it after completing the 2255. The circuit denied the motion, but granted Vilar a six-month extension of time to perfect his appeal.

The court noted that Vilar’s request was somewhat unusual. Usually, a defendant first pursues a direct appeal then, if he wishes, a 2255 motion. Vilar’s application would allow a collateral attack first and a direct appeal second, a route that “raises concerns both jurisdictional and practical.”…

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Summary Summary

At last – more summary orders of interest.

In United States v. White, No. 10-2631-cr (2d Cir. July 18, 2011) (summary order), the circuit vacated the district court’s decision denying resentencing under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2).

The case has a long procedural history. White originally rejected a plea offer that included one § 924(c) count while dropping another, but his attorney never told him that the second one carried a mandatory twenty-five year consecutive sentence. White ended up convicted after trial and facing a 570 to 622 month guideline range. On his habeas corpus petition, the district court concluded that his attorney had been ineffective, and fashioned an equitable remedy under which the court sentenced him under the final offer White had rejected – one count of crack trafficking and one § 924(c) count. This produced a 168-month sentence: 108 (a guideline sentence) on the crack count, plus 60 on …

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To The Manner Porn

United States v. Jennings, No. 10-1642-cr (2d Cir. July 22, 2011) (Kearse, Miner, Chin, CJJ)

For defendant Russell Jennings, looking at child pornography was a hard habit to break. He served a twenty-one-month possession sentence in a 2006 case then, in 2009, while on supervised release, did it again. For the 2009 case, he received a long prison sentence, plus a concurrent supervised release violation sentence on the 2006 case, and a lifetime term of supervised release.

His appellate claims related largely to the way the evidence against him in the 2009 case was developed. He argued that his probation officer was improperly involved in the procurement of the search warrant and criminal complaint, and that incriminating statements he made to the officer were obtained in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The circuit affirmed.

For the first argument, Jennings asserted that his probation officer lacked the statutory and constitutional authority …


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Categories: Fifth Amendment, supervised release, Uncategorized

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Sunday, July 10th, 2011

Summers-Time Blues

United States v. Bailey, No. 07-3819-cr (2d Cir. July 6, 2011) (Cabranes, Pooler, Raggi, CJJ)

In Michigan v Summers, 452 U.S. 602 (1981), the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment permitted police officers to detain the occupant of a premises during the execution of a search warrant, without need for individualized suspicion of the person detained. Here, the circuit, joining an issue in which the courts are divided, held that Summers also permits detaining the occupants after they have left the premises.

Background

In July of 2005, Suffolk County detectives obtained a search warrant for a basement apartment in Wyandanch, based on an informant’s tip that there was a gun there. When they arrived at the location to execute the warrant, they saw Bailey and an associate exiting the apartment. They drove off and the officers followed; about a mile from the apartment, the officers stopped Bailey’s car.

The …


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Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Summary Summary

It has been a while, but here are three more summary orders of interest.

In United States v. Mancuso, No. 10-2420-cr (2d Cir. June 30, 2011), the court identified several sentencing errors in connection with a prosecution for environmental crimes. First, the district court erred in applying the multi-object conspiracy guideline, U.S.S.G. § 1B1.2(d). When a defendant is convicted of multi-object conspiracy, this section requires the court to sentence as if the defendant had been convicted on a “separate count of conspiracy for each offense that the defendant conspired to commit.” The sentencing court is to sit as the trier of fact and determine, using the reasonable doubt standard, whether it “would convict the defendant of conspiring to commit the particular objects” Here, the district court did not make any specific findings under this section, so the circuit remanded the case for further findings. Second, the district court committed plain …

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Sunday, June 26th, 2011

PC World

United Sates v. Gravel, No. 10-1045-cr (2d Cir. June 20, 2011) (Pooler, Wesley, Chin, CJJ) (per curiam)

The court’s latest per curiam looks at the firearm guideline’s six-level enhancement for “machineguns.” See U.S.S.G. § 2K2.1(a)(5).

The defendant’s gun was a Colt machinegun, initially designed to fire automatically, but had been retrofitted to fire only semi-automatically. Defendant argued that since the definition uses the present tense – a machinegun is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot” – his now semi-automatic weapon should not receive the enhancement. Looking to the dictionary definition of “designed,” the court held that, when applied to a “manufactured object such as a firearm,” the word referred to what the gun was “conceived of and designed for and not to any modifications made afterwards.”

Here, since the gun was made for use as an …

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Circuit Says SDNY Jury Selection Is “Trivial”

United States v. Gupta, No. 09-4738-cr (2d Cir. June 17, 2011) (Walker, Parker, Hall, CJJ)

Anyone who has ever selected a jury in the Southern District knows that the typical voir dire there is a perfunctory affair indeed: a few questions about potential bias, a few about household composition, then you exercise your challenges and open after lunch. Perhaps that’s why the panel majority here held that the exclusion of the entire public for an entire SDNY voir dire was covered by the circuit’s “triviality exception” to the Sixth Amendment right to a public trial.

Before jury selection began at Gupta’s immigration fraud trial, the district court closed the courtroom to the public, preventing – at a minimum – Gupta’s girlfriend and brother from attending. The court acted without notice to the parties and, when later called upon to do so, gave two reasons for the closure: the need to …


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Sunday, June 19th, 2011

Mommy Dearest

United States v. O’Connor, No. 08-5968-cr (2d Cir. June 16, 2011) (Kearse, Pooler, Hall, CJJ)

Linda O’Connor began sexually abusing her daughter, S.O., when S.O. was ten years old. O’Connor also allowed her friend – he was also her occasional financial benefactor and sex partner – George Lang, to do so; O’Connor even sometimes joined in. Lang died of cancer before he could be prosecuted, and O’Connor then passed S.O. on to her landlord, co-defendant Dean Sacco, in lieu of paying rent. Sacco raped S.O. many times, and also took pictures of the abuse. Finally, on two occasions, O’Connor brought S.O. to a motel in Binghamton, where strangers raped her for money, while O’Connor looked on and ordered her to follow the men’s instructions.

O’Connor and Sacco were convicted of various sex trafficking and child pornography offenses; she was sentenced to 30 years and he to life. This opinion affirms …


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Thursday, June 16th, 2011

Coffee, Tea or Venue?

United States v. Tzolov, No. 10-562-cr (2d Cir. June 15, 2011) (Feinberg, Parker, Wesley, CJJ)

Eric Butler, the appellant here, was one of the conspirators in a securities fraud scheme arising from the failure of the auction rate securities market. The scheme operated largely out of an office in Manhattan, but Butler was prosecuted in the Eastern District, where he was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The scheme’s ties to EDNY were, to put it mildly, scant – on occasion the defendants would fly out of JFK to meet with investors in other cities and try to scam them. But, apart from that, everything happened elsewhere.

On appeal, the circuit agreed that venue was improper in EDNY for the substantive securities fraud count, but affirmed as to the conspiracy counts. In light of the dismissal of one count, the court also remanded the …

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Sunday, June 12th, 2011

PC World

Here are two per curiams in white collar cases, decided on the same day.

First, in United States v. Lauerson, No. 09-0255-cr (2d Cir. June 7, 2011) (McLaughlin, Pooler, Sack, CJJ) (per curiam), the circuit agreed that the district court lacked the authority to waive the delinquency and default penalties arising from the defendant’s falling behind on his restitution payments. The relevant statute, 18 U.S.C. § 361, permits courts to, in some circumstances, modify or remit the restitution order itself, but does not permit waiver of those penalties.

And, in United States v. Wolfson, No. 10-2786-cr (2d Cir. June 7, 2011) (Kearse, Pooler, Lynch, CJJ), the court found no error in the jury instructions at a“pump and dump” securities fraud trial. The scheme operated by having corrupt stock brokers selling overvalued stocks, for which they were rewarded with “exorbitant” commissions that they either failed to disclose at all or lied …


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What’s Drug Dealer To Do?

United States v. Figueroa, No. 10-2050-cr (2d Cir. May 16, 2011) (Miner, Cabranes, Straub, CJJ)
Several months ago, in a per curiam, the court held that it was not error for a district court to treat the combination of BZP and TFMPP, which is commonly sold on the street as ecstasy, but for which there is no dedicated guideline, as ecstasy (“MDMA”) . This opinion deals with BZP alone, and reaches a different result.
Here, the defendants had about 20,000 pills containing BZP, combined with trace – the circuit called it “unmeasurable” – amounts of other substances, including TFMPP. The district court treated the pills as containing pure BZP, then analogized BZP to MDMA for guidelines purposes. The defense disputed this, and asked for a hearing, but the district court refused even that, relying on the DEA’s lab report and the fact that BZP is sold as MDMA on

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