Legal News & Updates
United States v. Gonzalez, No. 23-10578 (July 19, 2024)
In United States v. Gonzalez, No. 23-10578 (July 19, 2024) (Wilson, Luck, Lagoa), the Court affirmed Mr. Gonzalez’s conviction, in accordance with his guilty plea, for possessing stolen mail in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1708. Mr. Gonzalez, based on a 911 complainant’s report and Miami-Dade police officers’ subsequent observations, was arrested for loitering and prowling—a misdemeanor under Florida law. The officers searched Mr. Gonzalez’s backpack incident to the arrest and found sealed mail that Mr. Gonzalez had removed from neighborhood mailboxes. On appeal, Mr. Gonzalez argued that the officers lacked probable cause for the arrest because the Fourth Amendment does not permit a warrantless misdemeanor arrest for a misdemeanor committed outside an officer’s presence. The Court disagreed. It instead held that while an officer’s presence for a warrantless misdemeanor arrest would be consistent with the Fourth Amendment, it is not necessarily a constitutional prerequisite. This is so for three reasons. First, the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment need only guarantee at least as much protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as the common law had provided when the Amendment was adopted. The common law, however, had no "per se rule" that a misdemeanor arrest was unjustifiable unless the [...]
United States v. Steiger, No. 22-10742 (July 16, 2024)
In United States v. Steiger, No. 22-10742 (July 16, 2024) (CJ Pryor, J. Pryor, Coogler of N.D. Ala.), the Court (on remand from the en banc Court) affirmed Mr. Steiger’s twenty-year-prison sentence, which the district court imposed upon revoking Mr. Steiger’s original sentence of probation for four wire-fraud-related convictions. The revocation stemmed from Mr. Steiger's intervening state-court conviction of second-degree murder. The Court held that Mr. Steiger failed to demonstrate plain error with respect to the prison sentence’s procedural reasonableness. This is because the district court stated that it had considered the following: (1) every 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) factor; (2) the applicable guidelines and policy statements from the Sentencing Commission; (3) court decisions; (4) the issues presented in the underlying case; (5) evidence presented at the revocation hearing, part of which concerned the nature and circumstances of the offense, as set forth in § 3553(a)(1); and (6) statements Mr. Steiger made in his defense. Additionally, the record indicated that the district court was aware of argument that the guidelines sentence was inadequate because of the seriousness of Mr. Steiger’s probation violation. Although the district court never explain why it had rejected Mr. Steiger’s request for a time-served sentence, the Court deemed it sufficient [...]
United States v. Buselli, No. 23-10272 (July 11, 2024)
In United States v. Buselli, No. 23-10272 (July 11, 2024) (Jordan, Lagoa, Hull), the Court affirmed Ms. Buselli’s convictions for murder for hire and making false statements to a federal agent, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1958(a) and 1001(a), respectively. The murder-for-hire plot was intended for Ms. Buselli’s ex-boyfriend or some other third party to murder Ms. Buselli’s estranged husband. The related jury instruction provided that “[m]urder is the unlawful, premeditated killing of a human being with malice aforethought and is a violation of the laws of the State of Florida.” The Court rejected Ms. Buselli’s claim that this instruction needed to include language concerning Florida’s defenses of justifiable and excusable homicide and justifiable use of deadly force because such defenses could have resulted in a lawful killing. In any event, the Court added, the district court’s failing to provide defense instructions was harmless. Florida law on the defenses required evidence that Ms. Buselli sought either third party to kill the husband by accident or misfortune, or in an effort to defend Ms. Buselli herself from an attempted murder or from a forcible felony by the husband. But the record contained no such evidence. Additionally, evidence of the steps Ms. Buselli took [...]
United States v. Hernandez, No. 22-13311 (July 8, 2024)
In United States v. Hernandez, No. 22-13311 (July 8, 2024) (Rosenbaum, Newsom, Luck), the Court affirmed Mr. Hernandez’s sentence for several 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) convictions, among other offenses on the same indictment. Although Mr. Hernandez’s original sentence was pronounced before the First Step Act’s passage, it was judicially vacated after such passage. He therefore argued—and the government conceded—that the modified stacking rule under § 403(a) of the Act applied to his case. A majority of the panel disagreed. Mr. Hernandez’s argument, it reasoned, depends on whether the vacated sentence qualifies as “a sentence” that “has been imposed as of [the] date of [the Act’s] enactment,” within the meaning of § 403(b) of the Act. It does, the majority held. This is so because the vacated sentence satisfies the dictionary definition of “sentence.” Meanwhile, Congress’s use of the indefinite “a” indicates that § 403(b) covers any type of “sentence”—even one that was subsequently vacated. Further, the phrase “has not been” refers to a completed act, and Eleventh Circuit precedent establishes that the verb “imposed,” as used in the criminal sentencing context, refers to the historical fact of pronouncement. So because the district court had pronounced a sentence for Mr. Hernandez before the Act’s enactment, and because [...]
United States v. Wright, No. 22-12338 (Mar. 19, 2024)
In United States v. Wright, No. 22-12338 (Mar. 19, 2024) (Branch, Grant, Carnes), the Court affirmed Mr. Wright’s conviction, pursuant to a plea agreement, for producing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a) and (e). Mr. Wright argued that § 2251(a) required proof that the minor in question had volitionally participated in the sexually explicit conduct, but that she could not have done so because she was asleep. And so, the district court violated Rules 11(b)(1)(G) and (b)(3) in accepting Mr. Wright’s guilty plea because the court neither discussed this volition requirement when instructing Mr. Wright on the charge’s nature, nor required the government to make a factual showing of volition. The Court disagreed. Section 2251, it held, did not require the minor to have been actively engaged in sexually explicit conduct. It sufficed that the minor served as the object of Mr. Wright’s sexual desire as he engaged in the conduct. 202212338.pdf (uscourts.gov) https://defensenewsletter.blogspot.com/2024/04/wright-child-pornography-production.html
United States v. Gbenedio, No. 22-12044 (Mar. 6, 2024)
In United States v. Gbenedio, No. 22-12044 (Mar. 6, 2024) (CJ Pryor, Rosenbaum, Abudu), the Court affirmed Mr. Gbenedio’s convictions and sentence for unlawful drug dispensing. The charges were based on allegations that Mr. Gbenedio, a licensed pharmacists, had operated his business as a “pill mill.” The Court addressed six issues: First, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Mr. Gbenedio’s motion to dismiss. Mr. Gbenedio conceded that the indictment alleged facts about him and his pharmacy, the Controlled Substances Act, and all of the fake prescriptions that Mr. Gbenedio allegedly filled. The prosecution had no obligation to explain its legal theory as to why the prescriptions were invalid, or to provide a detailed disclosure of its evidence before the trial. And in any event, Mr. Gbenedio had learned the prosecution’s theory, including the details in a bill of particulars, as recent as one year before trial. Second, the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting a DEA agent’s testimony about convictions of employees from a pain clinic that was associated with Mr. Gbenedio’s pharmacy, including testimony that law enforcement learned of the pharmacy while investigating the clinic. The Court rejected argument that the testimony [...]