United States v. Castillo, No. 11-2792 (7th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CaseDefendant pleaded guilty to conspiring to make and sell false identification documents, such as documents identifying the bearer as a permanent resident of the U.S., 18 U.S.C. 1028(a)(1), (2), (f). His guidelines sentencing range was 37 to 46 months, but the judge sentenced him to 60 months, within the statutory maximum of 15 years. His lawyer filed an Anders brief in which he argued that there is no valid ground for challenging the sentence and asking to be allowed to withdraw. The Seventh Circuit allowed counsel to withdraw and dismissed. Although the departure was by 30 percent, the guideline range for the false-document offense rises in stages as the number of false identification documents increases, but only up to 100. Defendant was estimated to have been responsible for 2800 documents. The court did not “see how imposing a sentence 30 percent above the guidelines range could be thought excessive punishment for 28 times the number of fraudulent documents that triggers the highest guideline sentence, when a 1 percent increase in documents (from 99 to 100) would have increased his maximum guideline sentence by 39 percent.” Defendant also marketed computer software for producing still more counterfeit personal-identification documents.
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