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Federal Defenders of New York Second Circuit Blog


Friday, May 29th, 2009

Reduction Ad Absurdum

United States v. Savoy, No. 08-4800-cr (2d Cir. May 27, 2009)(per curiam)

After a 1998 jury trial on crack distribution charges, Demetric Savoy faced a guideline sentencing range of 188 to 235 months’ imprisonment, and received a sentence at the bottom of the range. In 2008, he moved, under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2), for a sentence reduction under the retroactive ameliorating amendment to the crack guidelines. With that amendment, Savoy faced a revised range of 151 to 188. However, in the motion, he argued that the court should sentence him to 120 months. The district court granted the § 3583(c)(2) motion and reduced the sentence to 151 months, but refused to go lower. The court believed that the relevant guideline provision, § 1B1.10, was binding and precluded a sentence below the amended range.

On appeal, the circuit affirmed. The language of § 1B.10 is mandatory: the court “shall not reduce …

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Categories: 3582(c)(2), crack amendment, Uncategorized

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Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Citizen Feign

United States v. Tureseo, No. 07-2933-cr (2d Cir. May 14, 2009)(Miner, Cabranes, CJJ, Berman, DJ)

Juan Tureseo was deported in 1997, after an assault conviction. Immigration agents found him in the United States in 2006, at which time he insisted he was a United States citizen named Danny Ortega. When the agents warned him that it was a crime to lie to them, he admitted the truth.

Tureseo was originally charged only with illegal reentry. As that case wore on, however, he again insisted that he was Danny Ortega, a United States citizen. His wife provided Ortega’s birth certificate to his counsel, who passed it on to the government, asserting that it belonged to his client. As a consequence, the government obtained a superseding indictment charging Tureseo with falsely claiming United States citizenship and aggravated identity theft. Tureseo, now with new attorneys, was convicted after a jury trial.

The Defendant’s …

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Categories: right to be present; aggravated identity theft, Uncategorized

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Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Summary Summary

There have been five summary orders of interest in the past month or so. Here they are:

In United States v. Al Manware, No. 08-2235-cr (2d Cir. May 4, 2009), the court ordered resentencing on a supervised release violation because the district court did not provide the defendant an opportunity to allocute before imposing sentence.

In United States v. McGowan, No. 08-2603-cr (2d Cir. May 4, 2009), the court found no abuse of discretion in the district court’s permitting hearsay at a supervised release revocation hearing. The declarant was a 12-year-old child victim and the district court “implicitly found” that her age and the “suggestive nature of the offense weighed in favor of not requiring her testimony.” Moreover, the hearsay was trustworthy, since it was supported by “ample circumstantial evidence” such as surveillance photographs and the defendant’s own admissions.

In United States v. Scott, No. 08-1489-cr (2d Cir. April 14, …

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The Pursuit of Happy Ness

United States v. Ness, No. 05-4401-cr (2d Cir. May 8, 2009) (Winter, Calabresi, Pooler, CJJ)

Samuel Ness was convicted of money laundering offenses in connection with his armored car business, which received and distributed millions of dollars in narcotics proceeds. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. On his first appeal, the circuit affirmed. He then sought certiorari in the wake of Regalado Cuellar v. United States, 128 S.Ct. 1994 (2008), and the Supreme Court vacated the affirmance and remanded the case for further consideration. This time, the circuit found that the evidence was insufficient and reversed the conviction.

Cuellar held that, for transportation money laundering offenses, the government must prove that the defendant’s purpose, “in whole or in part, was to conceal the nature, location, source, ownership or control of the funds.” A showing that a defendant hid funds during transportation is not sufficient to support a conviction, …

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Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Extension Headache

United States v. Vargas, No. 08-1542-cr (2d Cir. May 5, 2009)(Calabresi, Livingston, CJJ, Restani, JCIT)

In connection with a drug conviction, Raphael Varas was sentenced to a five-year term of supervised release. In January of 2008, he pled guilty to a supervised release violation. At his sentencing, the district judge said “the sentence is going to be six months’ home confinement,” and entered a written judgment providing that Vargas “shall be on supervised release for … [s]ix (6) months home confinement and electronic monitoring.” The court made no mention of any supervised release beyond the period of home confinement.

Two months later, however, the court entered an “Amended Judgment” that contained the same six-month period of home confinement but also continued the original five-year term of supervised release. Vargas appealed from the Amended Judgment, arguing that, since the court revoked his supervised release in January, absent a new violation, the …

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Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

If You Love Her, Let Her Go

United States v. McGee, No. 07-4509-cr (2d Cir. April 24, 2009)(Leval, Katzmann, Livingston, CJJ)

A Rochester police officer responded to 911 call at defendant McGee’s home. When the officer arrived, he saw McGee running away through the backyard. McGee’s girlfriend was outside the house. She told the officer that she lived there with McGee, but was trying to move out. She had packed her bags and put them on the front porch, but McGee, to prevent her from leaving, had grabbed her bags, put them back inside, locked the door and taken away her keys. She asked the officer to break down the door so she could retrieve her belongings. He refused, but once she proved she really lived there, he let her break in herself.

The officer then accompanied her while she collected belongings. When she observed that McGee stored guns in the front closet, the officer asked for …

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Categories: consent, Fourth Amendment, Uncategorized

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Porn At Home

United States v. Polouizzi, No. 08-1830-cr (2d Cir. April 24, 2009)(Leval, Katzmann, Raggi, CJJ)

Defendant – referred to in the opinion as Peter Polizzi – was convicted by a jury of eleven counts of possession of child pornography, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(4)(B), and twelve counts of receipt of child pornography, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(2), after the jury rejected his insanity defense. Post-trial, he made a Rule 33 motion, arguing that the district court erred by refusing to inform the jury that the receipt counts carried a five-year mandatory minimum. Based in part on a post-verdict colloquy with the jurors that revealed that at least some of them would have accepted the insanity defense had they known of the mandatory minimum, the court granted the motion on the receipt counts only. Both sides appealed.

The Defendant’s Appeal

A. Double Jeopardy

1. Multiple Counts of Possession…

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Categories: child pornography, double counting, mandatory minimum, Rule 33, Uncategorized, waiver

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Caboose of Discretion

United States v. Borden, No. 08-1625-cr (2d Cir. April 22, 2009: amended opinion) (Cabranes, Hall, CJJ, Sweet, DJ)

Every other circuit to consider the question has concluded that a district court’s denial of a crack retroactivity motion under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2) is reviewed for abuse of discretion. With this decision, the Second Circuit joins the train.

Applying that standard here, the court affirmed. The district court reviewed the relevant records, considered the § 3553(a) factors and cited an appropriate reason – the danger that Borden posed to the community. In light of Borden’s lengthy criminal history, the district court was free to reject the Probation Department’s conclusion that Borden no longer “pose[d] a threat to society.”…

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Khat Red-Handed

United States v. Abdulle, No. 06-3647-cr (2d Cir. April 22, 2009) (Newman, Sotomayor, Katzmann, CJJ)

Defendant Mohamed was convicted of distributing cathinone, the active ingredient in khat leaves, and challenged the sufficiency of the evidence against him. The circuit affirmed.

The difficulty, as always in khat cases, is the complex regulatory scheme for this substance. See Krazy Khat, posted September 27, 2008. Khat itself is not a controlled substance. Cathinone, the stimulant present in the leaves when it is first harvested is a Schedule I controlled substance; cathine, the substance that cathinone turns into after a few days, is a Schedule IV controlled substance and is not always illegal.

Mohamed was specifically charged with trafficking in the Schedule I substance. Thus, the government was required to prove that he knew that he possessed and intended to deal in a controlled substance, and that he in fact possessed cathinone. His sufficiency …

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The Acquittal That Wasn’t

United States v. McCourty, No. 07-3862-cr (2d Cir. April 9, 2009) (Miner, Sotomayor, Katzmann, CJJ)

Background

At McCourty’s drug trial, one of the counts in the indictment alleged that he possessed with the intent to distribute both a quantity of cocaine and more than five grams of crack. The facts underlying this count were unusual: McCourty ran away from some police officers and dropped a bag containing a small amount of both drugs on the street. Twenty minutes late, the officer found him at his grandmother’s apartment wearing a backpack that contained more than five grams of crack.

Before trial, defense counsel noted a duplicity “problem” with this count and asked for a “special interrogatory” to avoid a general verdict that would not reveal the type or quantity of drugs the jury found that McCourty had possessed. The district judge addressed this problem in the verdict sheet, which split the …

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Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Straddle Sore

United States v. Josephberg, No. 07-3958-cr (2d Cir. April 9, 2009) (Kearse, Sack, Katzmann, CJJ)

Background – Multiple Acts of Tax Fraud and Evasion

A “straddle” is a type of tax shelter transaction involving the simultaneous ownership of a contract to buy a commodity for delivery in a future month and a contract to sell the same amount of the same commodity in a different future month. Either the purchase or sale contracts can be sold at a loss. Josephberg’s company sold interests in limited partnerships that invested in such straddle transactions. The partnership owned both contracts to buy and contracts to sell, and each year it would sell the type of contract that had decreased in value, to realize the losses. Individual partners would claim their shares of the losses as deductions on their tax returns for that year, and the partnership would defer the sale of the offsetting …

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