United States v. Bennett, No. 19-1299 (7th Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CaseThe Zamudio drug organization distributed pounds of methamphetamine and cocaine throughout the Indianapolis area. Zamudio imported the drugs from his suppliers in Mexico and oversaw his distributors, including De La Torre, Chapman, Rush, and Bennett. Gonzalez was Zamudio’s girlfriend; she allowed Zamudio to store and traffic drugs out of her home and helped launder Zamudio’s drug money and wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mexico and California. All five eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In consolidated appeals, the Seventh Circuit affirmed the sentences of Gonzalez, De La Torre, and Bennett. The court upheld the application of the aggravating role enhancement to Gonzalez’s sentence and found that De La Torre waived any challenge to his conditions of supervised release. Bennett's below-Guidelines sentence was reasonable. The court vacated the guilty pleas of Chapman and Rush. For those defendants, the government filed an information pursuant to 21 U.S.C. 851(a) alleging that prior state law convictions were each a “felony drug offense” under 21 U.S.C. 841, so that each faced mandatory minimums of life in prison. Their plea agreements were based on errors regarding the mandatory minimum sentences they would have otherwise faced and were not entered into knowingly and intelligently.
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.