United States v. Marks, No. 15-2862 (7th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseMarks pled guilty to conspiring to distribute heroin. Marks had been convicted of state controlled‐substance offenses in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2000. For the career‐offender Guideline (U.S.S.G. 4B1.1) to apply, at least two of those convictions would need to count for criminal history points. For a conviction to count, Marks had to have been imprisoned on that conviction within 15 years of his commencement of the offense in this case (October 2013). The 2000 conviction counts. Marks was paroled on all of the 1990s offenses in June 1998; if his parole was revoked for any of those offenses when he committed the 2000 drug crime, the incarceration on the revocation would fall within the window. The plea contemplated that Marks would receive criminal history points only for the 2000 conviction, resulting in a 51-63-month Guidelines range. The probation officer who wrote the PSR, based on handwritten records from the Illinois Department of Corrections, concluded that Marks’ 2000 imprisonment included revocation of his parole for an earlier conviction. There is no court order revoking parole. He was sentenced to 108 months in prison. The Seventh Circuit vacated. The district court committed legal error in that it did not make the finding needed to treat Marks as a career offender and made a factual error because it did not have reliable evidence from which it could have found that Marks was imprisoned on a revocation of parole on any earlier conviction.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.