United States v. Torres, No. 13-50088 (9th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseThe Ninth Circuit affirmed defendants' convictions and sentences for racketeering, drug trafficking conspiracy, and related offenses involving the Puente-13 street gang. The panel held that the district court's jury instruction for determining drug quantities under 21 U.S.C. 841(b) was not reversible error, even though the jury was not required to find that the drug quantities related to violations that were part of a jointly undertaken criminal activity; the district court did not err in denying a defendant's request for an instruction on multiple conspiracies where the evidence did not show that defendant was involved only in a separate, unrelated conspiracy; and the district court did not err in concluding that defendants had state convictions that were prior to the conviction in this case for purposes of the section 841(b) mandatory minimum.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel affirmed four defendants’ convictions and sentences for racketeering, drug trafficking conspiracy, and related offenses involving the Puente-13 street gang. The panel held that the district court’s jury instruction for determining drug quantities under 21 U.S.C. § 841(b), which required the jury to determine drug quantities that were reasonably foreseeable to each defendant in connection with his criminal activity, was not reversible error, even though the jury was not required to find that the drug quantities related to violations that were part of a jointly undertaken criminal activity. In a separate opinion that states the majority opinion as to this issue, Judge Clifton wrote that the reasoning of United States v. Banuelos, 322 F.3d 700 (9th Cir. 2003), in favor of employing a disjunctive formulation for assigning an 4 UNITED STATES V. TORRES individual conspirator’s responsibility for drug quantity, has since been undermined. Judge Clifton wrote that en banc review will ultimately be necessary to sort out the inconsistency in the case law, but that the questions need not be resolved in this case because plain error review applies here, and any error in the jury instructions did not affect the defendants’ substantial rights. The panel held that the district court did not err in denying defendant Abraham Aldana’s request for a multiple conspiracies instruction, where there was no evidence upon which the jury could rationally sustain the defense that he was a member only of separate conspiracies and not of the Puente- 13 conspiracy. The panel rejected the defendants’ argument that because their state convictions overlap temporally with their convictions in this case, the state convictions cannot be considered “prior” convictions that trigger sentencing enhancements under § 841(b). The panel held that because the jury verdict necessarily determined that the defendants’ conspiracy continued past the dates when their state convictions became final, the district court did not err in relying on the defendants’ prior drug convictions to impose the mandatory minimum penalties under § 841(b). The panel rejected the defendants’ argument that 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(b) and 851 violate the Sixth Amendment as interpreted in Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), and Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151 (2013). The panel explained that by permitting a court to find “the fact of a prior conviction,” the Supreme Court in Apprendi empowered a court to determine that the conviction was prior to the case before the court. UNITED STATES V. TORRES 5 In the portion of her opinion that constitutes a special concurrence in Judge Clifton’s opinion, Judge Ikuta wrote that the panel remains bound by Banuelos, and that the district court therefore did not err in only requiring the jury to determine what quantities of drugs were reasonably foreseeable to each defendant in connection with his criminal activity.
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