United States v. Maggio, No. 16-1795 (8th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseThe Eighth Circuit affirmed the bribery conviction and ten-year prison sentence the district court ordered for a former state-court judge who admitted to trading a remittitur in a case for a campaign contribution and then had second thoughts about his guilty plea. The court held that defendant waived at least part of his appeal; rejected defendant's claim that there was no factual basis for finding him guilty because there was no nexus requirement between the bribe and federal money; and held that an upward variance did not reflect double-counting where defendant was not just a significant public official who took a bribe, but that he was a judge who took a bribe to decide a case a particular way.
Court Description: Riley, Author, with Gruender, Circuit Judge, and Gritzner, District Judge] Criminal case - Criminal law and sentencing. There was a factual basis for defendant's plea for violating 18 U.S.C. Sec. 666, and the district court did not err in refusing to permit him to withdraw his guilty plea; upward variance did not reflect double-counting where the court determined that defendant's actions in taking a bribe to make a ruling in a particular case set his crime apart and made it significantly worse that the usual one to which Guidelines Sec. 2C1.1(b)(3) applies.
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