United States v. Chapman, No. 12-1415 (7th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseChicago police saw Chapman carrying a bag with what looked like the barrel of a rifle protruding from it. As officers approached, Chapman ducked into an abandoned duplex. An officer followed Chapman and saw him drop the bag in the living room; another caught Chapman as he tried to escape through a window. In the bag they found a distribution quantity of heroin and an assault rifle. Chapman was charged with possessing heroin with intent to distribute, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, and possessing a firearm as a felon. The jury returned a factually inconsistent verdict, convicting Chapman of possessing the drugs but acquitting him on the gun-possession counts. The Seventh Circuit vacated the conviction because the judge erroneously admitted details of his prior heroin-trafficking conviction for the purpose of proving that he knew how heroin is packaged and intended to distribute the drugs. The relevance to those issues depends entirely on a forbidden propensity inference. Even if the evidence was relevant in a nonpropensity way, its probative value was substantially outweighed by the risk of unfair prejudice given that Chapman’s defense was that he did not possess the bag. The error was not harmless. The judge also erroneously precluded him from explaining his six prior felony which had been admitted for impeachment purposes. Chapman wanted to blunt the impact by telling the jury that he had pleaded guilty and accepted responsibility in his earlier cases. The judge properly refused to compel the testimony of an eyewitness who might have supported his version of events. The witness was facing drug charges in a separate case and invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
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.